Is the HIV 'functional cure' the breakthrough it seems?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/04/hiv-cure-is-breakthrough-seems

Scientists on a quest to cure HIV will be enormously encouraged, as well as intrigued, by the reports from Mississippi in the US of a two-year-old child who had the virus at birth but who is now apparently free of it.

It sounds like one of those serendipitous breakthroughs that have characterised the fight against HIV and Aids, such as the discovery that some African sex workers are resistant to the virus and the realisation that people taking antiretroviral drugs, which suppress the levels of HIV in the body, are unlikely to infect their partners.

But is this the big one? Have doctors stumbled across the cure for HIV? Unfortunately not. This is progress and will open up new avenues for scientists to explore, but the implications for those already infected or even the still significant numbers of babies born with the virus in the developing world are sadly probably slight.

The Mississippi baby became infected because the mother had not been tested in early pregnancy. If she had, the woman would have been put on antiretroviral drugs, the baby would have been delivered by caesarean section and then given a short course of drugs – all of which would almost certainly have prevented transmission of HIV from mother to child.