How is it they can get ‘viral loads’ down to near undetectable levels but not outright kill off the virus?
In: Biology
HIV is a retro virus. Essentially, this means that it infects cells and becomes part of the cells DNA. Specifically, it infects cells that are part of the immune system.
You can treat HIV using antiretroviral drugs. These drugs stop the virus from duplicating in the body and infecting new cells.
The biggest issue with retroviruses is that they are pretty much permanently present in the body. Antiretroviral drugs stop the virus functioning, but as soon as you stop treatment, the infected cells start to produce more copies of the virus.
If you wanted to cure someone of HIV, you would need to remove all of the cells that have HIV in their DNA sequence. Naturally, this is near impossible to do at present, mostly because we cannot identify the specific cells or target them in such a way that healthy cells aren’t also targeted.
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