Via Reuters:

The child's story is the first account of an infant achieving a so-called functional cure, a rare event in which a person achieves remission without the need for drugs and standard blood tests show no signs that the virus is making copies of itself.

More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment would have the same effect on other children, but the results could change the way high-risk babies are treated and possibly lead to a cure for children with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The only other well-documented case of a cure in the world involved a middle-aged man with leukemia who received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor genetically resistant to HIV infection. The so-called Berlin patient, Timothy Brown, went through a costly and elaborate treatment (which also involved the destruction of his immune system). The Mississippi baby, by contrast, was treated with a cocktail of widely available drugs already used to treat HIV infection in infants.

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