viral rebound – when your viral load has been undetectable (under 50 copies/mL) and then becomes detectable. Sometimes viral rebound can be a lab error, sometimes a small temporary blip, and sometimes a real rebound that shows your virus may have developed resistance to one or more of the drugs in a combination treatment. See: virological failure.
Glossary
Selected words and phrases
HCV – hepatitis C, a virus that causes liver disease.
symptom – a sign of illness.
T1/2 (half-life) – the time taken a drug to clear from the highest concentration to half this level. Drugs have different half-lives in different compartments (ie half-life in blood can be different from the half-life inside a cell). It take 5 x the half-live for a drug to be considered cleared.
SIDA – the abbreviation for AIDS in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.