Glossary

mortality – medical word for death or dying.

Tmax – the time taken for a drug to reach the highest (maximum) concentration.

What happens when you take a drug?

SIDA – the abbreviation for AIDS in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

lipid – medical term for fat. The term ‘blood lipids’ refers to cholesterol and triglyceride levels in blood.

reverse transcriptase – an enzyme unique to HIV. It is used to convert single-strand RNA into double-strand DNA. This is needed before HIV’s genetic material can be integrated in the human DNA. HIV drugs that stop this process are called reverse transcriptase inhibitors (RTIs).