Whats the goal of anti-HIV treatment?
Recent studies of triple combinations of anti-HIV drugs have shown that it is possible to reduce the levels of HIV in the blood to levels too low for the PCR test to measure. The original PCR test could not find less than 400 copies of HIV RNA in a blood sample, but a new PCR viral load test is now available that can measure down to 50 copies of HIV RNA. This new test is called the “ultra-sensitive” PCR test. New guidelines from the Public Health Service state that the goal of anti-HIV treatment is to keep viral load as low as possible for as long as possible, ideally below the limit of what the viral load test can find. There is still concern that there is a lot of virus in other places in the body, not just the blood. Only 2& of HIV is in circulating blood. The rest is in your lymph system and other body tissue. Early results indicate that changes in viral load in the blood are mirrored in the lymph system, but research is ongoing. Also, measuring the good effect an HIV treatment has
