Timothy Brown is one of two known cases of HIV being cured. Image: Heidi Schumann/The New York Times

Most of the things we die of now don’t have cures, at least in any historical sense of “cure.” Think of the big killers in the developed world: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke. By and large, these are post-cure diseases. People with cancer can have cancer eradicated from their body, never to return again, but the likelihood of recurrence in most cancers makes saying the cancer has been “cured” difficult. Instead, we talk about five-year eradication rates: Has the cancer been gone for five years? Yes? Congrats, that is the cure analog for cancer.

HIV/AIDS is even more extreme. The five-year eradication rate for cancer is right about 50 percent (averaging men and women) while the five-year eradication rate for HIV is–wait for it–.000005 percent. That is two cures out of an estimated 34,000,000 infections worldwide. That doesn’t mean the other 33,999,998 are about to die (though many of them are) but you can see that “cure” gets even more difficult a term.

Doctors in both of those cases–Timothy Brown two years ago, and an infant in Mississippi announced last week–would likely prefer “five year eradication” over cure anyhow, given that we’re talking about the first two patients of a massive global epidemic of a disease whose great skill is in hiding from detection.

It’s extremely important to note and reiterate that in both “cured” cases of HIV, the actual cure was something of a fluke. In Brown’s case, it was a super-dangerous and brutal series of stem cell transplants performed to treat his leukemia and maybe, just maybe, his HIV in the process. It seems to have worked for both. In the infant’s case, it was delivering standard HIV treatment to a newborn much earlier than would be normal, before the infection had been properly confirmed. And that’s it. Both cases open up new avenues for studying treatments, but it’s not so much hitting cure gold.

Curable diseases still exist in the world, particularly in the developing world where tuberculosis and malaria still wreak havoc. But it’s only a matter of time before they catch up and join us here in this world of death’s shadow. I don’t doubt that it’s better here. That shadow of lifelong, expensive treatment for potentially deadly conditions is better than, well, dying and/or constantly watching dying.

So, how should we look at these kinds of diseases in a post-cure world? We can’t just say they’re cured. They still live in the body and, if treatment is withheld, that body would likely die. What else then? Treated? Eradicated? It still seems like we’re trying to fit new diseases–brought on, in part, via human beings’ new ways of living on Earth–into an old model of disease of disease as “other” thing that can be killed dead. The new diseases are by and large diseases involving the body attacking itself in some form or another—via immune cells, mutated cells—and not, like, a tough posse of bacterium poisoning your blood. (Though, as antibiotic resistance grows, that threat’s still out there.)

You probably know much more about the two HIV cure cases above than the several breakthroughs made pretty much monthly in the realms of treatments and prevention, no matter that treatment and prevention makes up the bulk of the research that lands in my inbox. Maybe that’s just fear. Ask a cancer survivor about cures vs. long-term treatment/management, and the emphasis on cures in the media makes a lot of sense. The idea of getting something deadly that you can’t get rid of is terrifying, particularly in the U.S. where that thing you’re dependent on forever comes from a frequently misbehaving corporation motivated by corporation-type things.

Timothy Brown was living in Germany when he was cured of HIV and, in the New York mag piece linked above he mentions not being particularly concerned about getting rid of his HIV, just solving the leukemia. Not being an especially rich dude or a public worker, he’s mostly likely covered by a public health insurance plan. One can imagine how different that must feel in the grand scheme of new-disease, to be covered by social program rather than an organization that would greatly prefer not to have to cover your HIV treatments. Maybe that’s the post-cure world, not having to be by yourself against death.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv