HIV and ID Observations

February 3rd, 2012

More on Low (but Detectable) Viral Loads — Is Knowing This Useful?

I have a very smart, very experienced colleague — clue, his initials are CC, and he doesn’t pitch for the Yankees — who continues to use bDNA testing for HIV viral load monitoring. You know, the assay with a lower limit of detection of 75 copies. He knows that bDNA is less sensitive than PCR. He knows […]

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March 4th, 2009

TaqMan HIV RNA Assay: Be Careful What You Wish For

At our hospital lab, we recently switched from the bDNA viral load assay to the new Roche TaqMan real-time PCR test.  The virologist in charge of our lab and the tech both agreed the assay was more accurate, more sensitive, and easier to do — so much so that we could increase the frequency of […]

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