Word: lymph
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...doesn't mean transmission is inevitable. Cuts bleed out, making it difficult for the other person's blood to seep in. Furthermore, healthy athletes don't usually have that much HIV in their blood anyway; in the first decade of infection, most of the virus is trapped in the lymph nodes...
...turns out, however, that the body and the virus engage in mortal combat from the beginning. The main battlefield is not the circulatory system (where physicians had been looking for the virus, dutifully taking blood samples every few months) but in the hard-to-reach lymph nodes. Now scientists realize that there is a window of opportunity, and a fairly large one at that, to attack the virus while it is still hiding, before it has started to wreak havoc on the body's natural defenses...
...second and longest stage begins after the body has successfully swept the virus from the blood and trapped it in the lymph nodes. HIV doesn't lie dormant, however. It still churns out copies of itself. But the damage is limited because the immune system has activated two powerful defense mechanisms: antibodies, which surge through the blood neutralizing any HIV particles that seep out of the lymph nodes, and a second group of specialized white blood cells, called killer T cells, which attack and destroy infected tissue...
...chance that he is right. In some people the second, mostly asymptomatic stage stretches out for a dozen years or more--or perhaps, in rare cases, indefinitely (see following story). But for the majority, the reprieve lasts only five or 10 years. Each year more HIV escapes from the lymph nodes into their blood. The immune system gets progressively weaker as more and more helper T cells...
...difference between the two groups of patients, scientists now believe, can be traced to the amount of HIV that has escaped from the lymph nodes. Researchers have only recently learned how to measure that level, and according to a report presented in Washington last week, it seems to be a more accurate gauge of the progress of the disease. It can also predict survival. In a study of 181 HIV-positive patients, 65% of the subjects who began the study with 34,500 or more virus particles per milliliter were dead within five years. By contrast, all the subjects whose...