In a report marking World Aids Day on Dec. 1, the advocacy organization ONE announced that we are reaching “the beginning of the end” of the disease: For the first time, “the world added more people last year to life-saving AIDS treatment than the number of people who became newly infected with HIV in the same year.”

But of the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV only 37 percent are taking medications, and 1 in 7 are unaware that they are HIV positive, according to the Centers for Disease Control. With new infections in the U.S. hovering around 50,000 per year, the end is still a long ways off.

To get there, some policymakers are turning to a pill: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is betting that the recently introduced pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), Truvada, will help to drastically reduce HIV by 2020. The drug’s effectiveness (it’s been shown to successfully thwart virus replication in HIV negative people) and its accessibility (the governor rightfully negotiated down its cost with the pharmaceutical companies that corner the anti-HIV drug market) make it the linchpin of New York’s newest HIV initiative. Cuomo hopes PrEP will, within five years, help to reduce the annual number of new HIV cases below the number of annual deaths caused by AIDS.

But treatment can also lead to complacency and, ultimately, more pills. Cuomo’s laudable plan, the first in the nation to set the stage for HIV eradication, risks failure, if it doesn’t also address HIV’s most virulent precursor, catalyst, and enabler: Poverty.

As it happens, the maps of poverty in the United States—where officially 14.5 percent of the population is poor and another 5 percent are nearly poor—overlay quite seamlessly onto the maps of HIV. That should come as no surprise to anyone who studies or treats chronic conditions, most of which—diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, etc.—correlate with poverty.