As a guarantee of health or or as a warning of inevitable trouble, the T-cell count leaves a lot to be desired. Pointless excitement Enter the viral load test. These tests measure the amount of viral activity in the peripheral blood by culturing the virus and expanding it in controlled conditions, then counting the resulting particles. Instead of waiting months to see if a treatment works, it should be possible to screen out the duds after a few weeks, which should drastically reduce the time needed to test and approve drugs. There are some drawbacks as well.
Viral load is measured on a logarithmic scale, which is hard to understand.
What this means is that a change in count has to reach a ten-fold difference to be significant. Thus a drop from 200,000 to 40,000, despite the dramatic difference in numbers, isn't actually a significant change. Even better would be a two-log change from 400,000 to 4,000, but I haven't heard of anyone accomplishing that. This allows a lot of leeway for people to get pointlessly excited or depressed over what seem to be large changes in viral load which are not, in fact, a big deal. Another problems is that the test is new and not yet officially recognized.