Posted on March 05, 2019
Source: NIAID
"Effective antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV maintains individual health and prevents transmission of the virus to others. For most people living with HIV, ART reduces viral load—the amount of HIV genetic material, or RNA, in blood plasma—to a level so low that it cannot be detected with standard tests.
Rarely, people living with HIV are unable to maintain an undetectable viral load despite strict adherence to daily ART. New NIAID-funded research suggests that this sometimes can occur when a single cell from the HIV reservoir—the population of long-lived HIV-infected cells that ART cannot eradicate—multiplies to create many identical cells that produce enough virus to be detected by standard viral load tests."
