How many HIV particles does “viral load” really represent?
Viruses can only cause damage if they are infectious. That is how they are supposed to cause ill health, by infecting cells and then causing cell death. Researchers attempting to see what proportion of the huge numbers of HIV reported by quantitative PCR represent active, infectious viruses, have found that as few as 1 in 10 million are actually infectious. This is done by “culturing” the virus, which usually means trying to infect other cells with it and looking for surrogate markers of HIV like gp 24. As outlined above, these proteins are actually quite non-specific and are often found in people who are HIV-negative. A virus that cannot infect another cell is essentially sterile, since it cannot harm any cells if it cannot infect them. Here are some comments on the results from one major study published in Science in 1993, where researchers found that the vast majority of “viral particles” found by viral load/quantitative PCR were non-infectious (Piatak et al. 1993). Circulating leve
