Is Hepatitis c the Rocky Balboa of the viral kingdom?

[St. George]

I recently posted that my doctor called with my 17 week vrl result and I was informed that I was down to a wimpy 508 viral copies(I started with  a vrl of 37 million).  My question to everyone here is how can so few copies maintain themselves in the presence of the onslaught of these powerful drugs.  What mechanism do they uses to hang on?  NyGirl stated that her vrl stayed around 400 copies for months, which to me is weird because why cant the drugs just finish kicking ass. Any insight anyone?

[jmjm530]

Heptimax is meausred in IU/ml (international units per milliliter) not copies. I believe "copies" is a different measurement and you would have to do a conversion if indeed your test is done in copies. Heptimax measures down to 5 IU/ml which in reality is down to 5000 international units in your entire blood system. Again, if my math is correct.

[jmjm530]

Give it one more try and then some food and the gym.

Let's assume for discussons sake that the test tube they use when they draw blood is 1 ml in volume. So when you get your report back and it says 508 IU/ml, what it really is saying is that is how many international units they found in the test tube. But in reality you have about 1000 test tubes of blood in your body. So in reality you would have 1000 X 508 IU's of virus in you. Hope this makes better sense, it is a confusing topic.

[jmjm530]

that's 1 liter equals 1000 ml == not 100 ml as stated.

[jmjm530]

Maybe someone can step in and  explain it better. Meanwhile, I wouldn't worry. 508 IU/ml is considered VERY low. You have definitely shown a response to the drugs and your viral load has declined after each test. That said, you're still detectible 17 weeks into treatment. Hopefully, you'll be non-detectible by week 24.

[GrandOak]

Mine VL went from 72 mil to 1.8 mil in 12 wks and then back to 2.9 mil at wk 24, ALL WHILE ON TX!  For me it has not been the Rocky but the Alien of the viral kingdom which will start crawling into the engine exhaust even when flushed into deep space.

For me the concern is that the dang dragon mutates and becomes resistent to the tx or worse overcomes the blood to blood only transfer and evolves from an epidemic to a pandemic (much like they suspect now to be the case with the origin of Avian Flu).  I've been told that there has been no indication of this occurring within the medical community to date, but then again I've also been told that such a large VL increase during tx has not been common either.

I only pray that I am not becoming the Typhoid Mary (or would it be Typhoid Harry in my case ;-) were this mutation is occuring.

[GrandOak]

It depends upon whether you are talking about total copies in your system or the copies per a sampling of your blood.  As Jim pointed out, the sampling measurement needs to be multiplied by the factor which equates the sample to the total amount of blood in your system (for instance if you sample a cup and the total amount is say 2 gallon, then you take the measurement of copies per cup and multiple it by the number of cups in 2 gallons to extrapolate the number of copies per cup to the number of copies in the system).

So you need to take the PCR measured in IU per ML and multiple it by the total ML of blood in your system to get the total copies of virus, as measured in IU/ML by the test, in your system.