IN JOURNALISM, cynics suggest, three data points are enough to pronounce a trend. As of March 3rd, AIDS researchers hope that two might be sufficient. On that day Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University announced to the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, Georgia, that a patient under her care had been cured of HIV infection. The announcement was hedged in the usual caveats (“functionally cured” was the exact term used). But the bottom line was clear. Dr Persaud thinks her patient, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl whose identity is confidential, has joined Timothy Brown, a man known to many as the “Berlin patient”, as a human being who was once definitively infected with HIV and now no longer is.
在新闻界，愤世嫉俗者认为三个案例足以推断出一种趋势。自3月3日起，艾滋病研究人员则希望两个可能就足够了。在那一天，（美国）约翰霍普金斯大学的黛博拉·佩尔绍德在佐治亚州的亚特兰大召开的逆转录病毒和机会性感染会议上表示，她已治愈一位患有艾滋病毒的病人。这一消息也受到很多的质疑（确切的称“功能性治愈”）。但是情况很清楚。佩尔绍德博士认为她的病人（2岁半的女孩，具体身份未透露）和人称“柏林病人”蒂莫西·布朗的病例相同，布朗曾确诊感染艾滋病毒，现已完全治愈。
The facts of the case that Dr Persaud was prepared to make public are limited (the patient is, after all, a child). But the pertinent point is that she was born infected because her mother was infected and was treated with standard anti-retroviral drugs almost immediately and for 18 months afterwards. She was then lost track of for five months. When the child returned to doctors’ attention, they found the virus had vanished—and six months later, despite the fact that the girl is no longer taking anti-AIDS medicine, there is no sign of HIV having returned in force.
佩尔绍德博士准备公之于众的案例是有局限性的（毕竟这仅是个孩子）。但是相关的内容是：因为小孩的妈妈感染了艾滋病毒，小孩在出生时被诊断出携带艾滋病毒，研究人员随即对其进行了18个月的标准性抗逆转录病毒治疗。此后五个月中止了治疗。当医生再次对该小孩进行检查时，发现她体内病毒已消失—6个月之后，虽然小女孩不用再服用抗艾滋病毒药物，但是她体内已没有艾滋病毒繁殖的迹象。
This is a result of great potential significance. Mr Brown’s cure was effected, accidentally, because his bone marrow (and thus the pertinent part of his immune system, which HIV infects) was destroyed and replaced during a course of treatment for leukaemia. That is hardly a viable approach for those who do not have that disease. But if HIV infection can be cured with drugs, as Dr Persaud’s observations suggest, a whole, new line of investigation opens up.
这一成功案例有潜在的重大意义。布朗先生的艾滋病意外地得到治愈，是因为在进行白血病治疗过程中，他的骨髓（以及受艾滋病感染的相关免疫系统部分）遭到破坏并得到移植。对于那些没有患白血病的艾滋病毒感染者来说，这不是一个可行的治愈方法。佩尔绍德博士的研究表明，如果药物能够治愈艾滋病患者，一项全新的调查研究即将开启。