How one would wish 'Mississipi' and 'Baltimore' together or alone will carry their frontiers into the perinatal grounds of the developing world particularly africa where there will never be shortage of materials to check false positives, false negatives and enough to have 'Numbers needed to treat'.

The mississipi case, much like the Berlin case, is so important a possible harbinger of scientific truth and so of hope that its reliability needs be verified as a matter of urgency in large field samples.

The concept of "Elite controllers" may also benefit from 'stress-testing' in an environment of 'epidemicity' where viral loads can serve to point the way forwards in this regard.

The cat and mouse game between viruses, CD4 lymphocytes and antiretrovirals can be better refereed in the gory battle grounds of africa far more convincingly than the rarefied fields of mississipi or baltimore if the current location mismatch between laboratory capability and field epidemics is corrected.

Hence in the interest of everyone, vis a vis security from an infective transmissible condition to which no one is absolutely immune, there ought to be better congruency between resources for those who fight the disease in the labs and those fighting the disease inside their bodies.

victims of the disease must be situated close enough to researchers of the disease to generate adequate sample sizes and robust confidence intervals in the research findings.

The logistical headaches that may beleaguer such arrangements might in the end be justified by the benefits of a certain conquest of the seemingly yet intractable disease.

Competing interests: None declared