Word: lymph
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...viral load was close to zero throughout the middle years, though it would gradually increase as time went by. Both Ho and Shaw realized, however, that zero doesn't always equal zero in the world of HIV. For one thing, the virus might be hiding out in the lymph nodes, where it could be producing thousands or even millions of copies of itself every day. As long as the immune system cleared those infectious particles as quickly as they formed, blood tests would show no change in viral load. "It's like a person running on a treadmill," Ho explains...
...people in the later stages of the infection. Researchers know that after years of infection, there isn't a hiding place in the body that the virus hasn't penetrated. A cure must do much more than clear HIV from the bloodstream. It must remove the virus from the lymph nodes, the brain, the spinal fluid, the male's testes and everywhere else it may be hiding. Today's combination therapies work in the blood, but they don't reach into the brain or the testes very well...
Sweeney's medical prognosis is good--her lymph nodes were cancer free, and doctors tell her there is little chance the cancer will recur. But her ordeal is eerily reminiscent of that of another former SNL cast member: Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989. The two had the same dressing room at SNL and the same doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and oddly, just before Sweeney got her cancer diagnosis, she had agreed to appear at a benefit for the Gilda Radner Foundation to fight ovarian cancer. "I feel guilty talking about her, because it seems...
...even the devil could have designed a virus as fiendish as HIV. Clear it out of the bloodstream and it hides in the lymph nodes. Banish it from the lymph nodes and it lurks in the brain. And even if it could be eradicated from the brain, it could still be found cradled among the chromosomes of a few quiescent immune cells, ready to pounce again after the hunters have gone away...
...find 12 men who had been infected with HIV for no more than 90 days. The men have been on combination therapy ever since, and Ho can't find a trace of the virus in their blood. In the next few weeks, he plans to take biopsies of their lymph nodes to see if the virus is hiding there, out of reach of both the drugs and the blood tests. If the nodes are clear, Ho plans to take some of the patients off their medication and see whether HIV bounces back. And if the biopsies do turn up infectious...