haematology – study (-ology) of blood (haema-)
Glossary
Selected words and phrases
sensitivity – when referring to the accuracy of a test result, sensitivity refers to the proportion of people with an illness or disease who have a positive test result.
If a test has low sensitivity, then false-negative results are the concern – where people have a condition but it is missed.
If a test has high sensitivity, then people are accurately diagnosed – and only a few people are missed.
For a serious condition, high sensitivity is essential to be able to identify people early.
See specificity.
sensitivity – when referring to the activity of a drug, sensitive means that a drug still works. As resistance develops a drug becomes less sensitive.
A complete loss of sensitivity implies that a drug is no longer working.
It also means that your partner may benefit from counselling.
IDU – injecting drug user
quantitative (in a study) – where what is being measured has a numerical value or fits a pre-defined scale or range of responses.
TasP (Treatment as Prevention) – a term to emphasise the impact that HIV drugs (ART) has on dramatically reducing the chance of HIV transmission.
ART is firstly for the health of the HIV positive person. But having an undetectable viral load on ART makes it so difficult to transmit HIV that the risk gets so close to zero that it is effectively zero.
For example, in the PARTNER study, nearly 900 couples had sex more than 58,000 times without condoms, without any transmissions. Each couple included one person who was HIV positive with an undetectable viral load on ART and one person who was HIV negative. ZERO transmissions.