The people at The Body have put together this pretty comprehensive resource of information about HIV viral load and what it means to patients. They do a good job of addressing the questions that patients may be worried or confused about, like sudden spikes in viral load and signs of drug resistance. The Body is a great HIV info resource in general, not a bad page to keep in your bookmarks.
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October 2008
October 16, 2008
October 07, 2008
A Viral Load Monitoring Success Story from Zambia
I’ve heard a lot of great stories about how viral load monitoring has helped doctors in resource-limited settings. One in particular always jumps to mind. A Dutch physician named Dr. Piet van Hasselt was working at the Kara Clinic in Lusaka, Zambia when he decided to give viral load testing a try to see if it made a significant difference in his treatment practice.
Up until that point, he only had access to CD4 tests. For his trial, he tested 40 patients with low CD4 counts. He intended to switch them to second-line therapy, assuming their treatment was no longer effective. The viral load tests showed that 60% of them had undetectable viral loads, and as such could remain on first-line treatment.
This gave the patients more time on effective therapy and kept more treatment options open in the future. It also saved the clinic a lot of money as second-line therapy is many times more expensive than first line – money which could then be used to provide more patients with treatment.
These are the kinds of results I believe all clinics should be entitled to and why I push for universal accessibility to viral load monitoring. When you look at stories like this, the medical and financial implications of universal accessibility are staggering.
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