A 2-year-old girl reportedly born with HIV was said to have been cured from the virus with an aggressive treatment.

Doctors treated the Mississippi native with drugs before the diagnosis was confirmed that she was positive, according to CNN. The treatment began 30 hours after birth, which is not usually done. Her mother was diagnosed HIV positive just before delivery. According to post doctoral researcher at the Wolkowicz for HIV research Lab at San Diego State Aleksandr Stotland, the “cure” is a potential way forward for mother-to-child transmissions, but not for the leading vectors of HIV spread, which are unprotected sex and intravenous drugs.

“It’s great for that family and that kid, but there are many factors that go into HIV,” Stotland said.

According to Stotland, the mother had low-titer HIV, which means it’s possible the child never got HIV. The New York Times reported the results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and that experts needed to be convinced the baby was truly infected.

Associate professor at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center Dr. Deborah Persaud said she was certain the baby had been infected. Five HIV-positive tests in the baby’s first month of life are being cited.

Stotland also said the applied therapy might not move ahead because of expensive drugs and side effects.

“It’s not financially feasible,” Stotland said. “That might be applicable in a very small subset of people in the Western world, but you can’t apply that to people in countries like South Africa where 25 percent of the people have HIV.”

Side effects of the treatment such as liver dystrophy and loss of appetite are also issues, Stotland said.

“It looks interesting, but I would be very careful in calling it a cure,” Stotland said.

Stotland compared the baby’s case with Timothy Brown’s, the first person cured from HIV who received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor genetically resistant to HIV infection.

“Again, that’s great for that person, and it is a step forward,” Stotland said. “And yes, we can cure the virus, but it’s not as if we have a treatment that works across men and women of all ethnic backgrounds, so it’s not a vaccine—and vaccine may not be the way to cure HIV either because the virus seems to be quite good at going around any vaccine approach so far.”

HIV has a high rate of mutation, and it doesn’t take much for the virus to evolve out of the drug activity, Stotland said.