What is a viral load and what does it tell me?

What is a viral load and what does it tell me?

Your viral load tells you how much HIV is in each “millilitre” of your blood (about the volume of a kidney bean). If you’re not on treatment, your viral load could vary widely—anywhere from a few thousand or less to a million or more. Although a lower viral load usually means you stay healthier longer, this link varies a lot among people.

If you’re on treatment, your viral load is a surefire way to know whether the drugs are working. If your treatment is successful, your viral load will fall to “undetectable”—too low for tests to measure. This doesn’t mean you’re cured or that the virus is gone, but it does mean it’s under control.

What are opportunistic infections?

We said before that you can get serious diseases if HIV goes untreated long enough. Maybe you found out you have HIV in the first place because you had one of these diseases. There are too many to list here, and they tend to have tongue-twisting names like Pneumocystis jirovecii (or they go by mysterious short-forms like PCP and MAC). Don’t feel dumb if you haven’t heard of them (or can’t pronounce them)—they were uncommon until HIV showed up.

Such diseases are rare because people with healthy immune systems can usually fight them off. However, these diseases can strike if they have the opportunity; that is, they infect people with weakened immune systems. For that reason, they are called opportunistic infections (OIs for short).

A lot of HIV-positive people used to die from OIs, and some still do if they can’t get treatment. But OIs are much more rare than they used to be, simply because HIV treatments have gotten so much better. As long as you are diagnosed early and get proper treatment, you shouldn’t have to worry about OIs.

If you found out about your HIV infection because you had an OI, you might consider learning more about the infection and what you can do to stop it from coming back.