Comment by TZubiri
10 hours ago
Are treated patients still contagious?
If so, if a treated patient spreads the virus, will that new patient carry an innoculated virus? Or will they suffer a standard infection?
10 hours ago
Are treated patients still contagious?
If so, if a treated patient spreads the virus, will that new patient carry an innoculated virus? Or will they suffer a standard infection?
For now all one can say is transmission is assumed to be dramatically reduced.
The bigger risk is likely that in some the suppression is temporary or transient flares of replication under some circumstances.
The other question is, does this avoid all the sequela of HBV. It seems to reduce risk of cirrhosis atleast.
For hiv, it took many decades to be able to make the clam undetectable = untransmittable using serodiscordant couple studies.
I'm pretty sure that if the virus and its DNA are undetectable then you can't spread it. I believe that's how it works with HIV anyway.
> if the virus and its DNA are undetectable then you can't spread it
The devil may be in the details. E.g. if a COVID test shows negative, it doesn't mean that you can't spread it. This is partly because different tests have different sensitivities.
> I'm pretty sure
FYI, without citations, it is hard to distinguish credible experts vs people on the internet saying "trust me bro".
Isn't half the selling point of antiretroviral therapy that you're no longer contagious?
https://i-base.info/u-equals-u/
U=U probably does not apply to all diseases for the reasons you mentioned though.
Ahh, the classic corona fallacy. If you have something, X, which you cannot detect. Then you can count it as zero, since all you can do, is speculation not backed by any empirical evidence. If there is something you can detect and measure, then, we can start the great a mighty process of science.
It's not really the same thing. If we exclusively tested coronavirus with PCR tests it'd be a lot more similar but the presence of kit tests and "30 minute covid testing" really muddied the water.
And of course Covid tests are primarily mucous membrane based which is going to be inherently harder to evenly test compared to a blood sample where viral load is pretty evenly distributed.
At least for blood based diseases, detecting viral load via PCR testing is to such a sensitivity that if there's essentially any active viruses out and about or any active viral RNA floating around in cells then the tests come back positive.
And with sustained antiviral use testing is less about "do I have it/will I become contagious in the near future" (like coronavirus) and rather "is my antiviral regimen still killing the virus faster than it can wake up from latent genetic material sleeping in DNA".
The former is a timing problem from one shot testing the latter is monitoring a steady state to track that the treatment remains effective and when it ceases being effective there's a lag time between viral load being detectable and sufficient viral load to be meaningfully contagious.
A patient that is functionally cured shouldn't pass on the disease. Since it is cleared from the blood and the viral DNA is undetectable, it is not replicating anymore, so it can't be transmitted. They risk is not absolute since the dormant virus is still genetically encoded in the liver.