Word: viral
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...this time, most researchers agreed that people in the later stages of AIDS had large quantities of HIV in their blood. But the PCR test showed that millions of viral particles were coursing through Ho's patients' blood in the earliest weeks of infection as well--as many as could be found in someone with a full-fledged case of AIDS. Within a few weeks, the viral load plunged to low and in some cases undetectable levels. The patients recovered and seemed healthy...
...blood tests indicated that the 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...
...year was 1994, and the new drugs were finally producing good results in the test tube. They worked against laboratory strains of the virus; they worked against viral samples taken from patients. Where AZT merely slowed viral reproduction, the protease inhibitors shut it down almost completely. Unfortunately, almost wasn't good enough. It often took less than a month for a few viral particles to mutate into a strain that was resistant to protease inhibitors. The new drugs were starting to look like another failure...
...chose 20 volunteers whose T cells had dropped from a normal level of about 1,000 cells per ml of blood to fewer than 500. The newest PCR tests showed that the viral load of these patients was holding steady at about 100,000 copies per ml of blood. Ho started treating his subjects with one of the new protease inhibitors being developed by Abbott Laboratories. As expected, the amount of virus that could be measured in the patients' blood practically disappeared. The treadmill had been stopped. But no one was ready for what happened next...
...cancer cells. Too often, they have found, the one-drug approach allows a few malignant cells to survive and blossom into an even more lethal tumor. The AIDS researchers faced a similar problem with HIV. Whenever they prescribed a single drug, such as AZT, for their patients, a few viral particles would survive and give rise to drug-resistant...