Earlier this month, news broke that a woman in Argentina had reportedly become the second most famous person in the world, whose immune system had apparently "cured" the HIV virus.
The report was published by research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by a team of scientists who see the case as opening a window for possible advances in the ongoing search for an HIV cure.
What do these rare and isolated examples of possible HIV cures say about our understanding of the virus 40 years after the onset of the public health crisis, where 36.3 million people died from AIDS-related diseases worldwide?
This latest case of natural HIV "cure" focuses on a 30-year-old woman first diagnosed with HIV in 2013.
"I like to be healthy," the woman known as the "Esperanza patient" told NBC News. "I have a healthy family. I do not need to be treated and live as if nothing happened. This is already a privilege. "
She has no signs of active HIV infection in the 8 years since her diagnosis. Current testing has not been able to detect the presence of HIV in cells.
Patient Esperanza is the second person reported to have probably avoided the virus naturally - by eventually erasing any sign of active HIV - without the aid of medical therapies such as stem cell transplants. The first was a woman from California, Loreen Willenberg, who is now 67 years old. She was diagnosed with HIV in 1992 and her immune system apparently performed the same function of natural elimination of HIV.
Beyond these two cases, the scientists reported that they cured two other people, called "London and Berlin patients", through stem cell treatments.
Timothy Ray Brown, the "Berlin patient" is the first person reported to have been cured of HIV through stem cell treatments. He died at the age of 54 from leukemia in 2020, according to the International Association for AIDS.
The race for an HIV cure has been a long, gradual and often frustrating process. We need to be clear that we do not have a definitive cure for HIV.
Yet whether it is coronavirus, hepatitis C or HIV, we are in an age where more resources, energy and innovation are trying to tackle the health threats affecting millions of people worldwide.
Sources: Healthline, LiveScience
