What is the level of virus replication in a typical HIV+ individual?
A typical viral load is somewhere around 10,000 virions/ml of blood plasma. When a patient is started on protease inhibitor treatment, there is typically a 100 fold drop in viral load in about 10 days. Mathematically, this is an exponential drop off with a “half-life” of about one day, and this provides a measure of the normal turnover rate. That is, about half the virions in a person’s blood are ones that were produced within the past day or so. So, for someone (not on antiviral drug therapy) with a viral load of 10,000 virions/ml, about 5 thousand or so new virions are being produced per ml of blood per day. In the body as a whole, perhaps a hundred million (or so) new virions are being produced every day. Essentially all of the virions present in the blood at any time were produced within the past week or so. At least a few million CD4+ T lymphocytes (“T4 cells”) get infected each day, and die within a couple of days. This ongoing (day after day after day after day…..) situation p
