As sonix says. The virus that are in your liver and other parts of your body are a bit harder to get the medications to. This is more so with fibrosis or cirrhosis. Think of the scars of cirrhosis as little walled off forts that the virus can hide in, it takes longer to get the medication past those barricades. As we don’t know exactly when this happens we rely on the original trials that told us that we needed to treat for x number of weeks in different situations to be reasonably sure of getting all the virus.

Hi beaches,

We can only measure the ones in our blood, we can’t directly measure the ones in the liver which take longer for the medications to reach and kill. So we kill the ones in the blood that we can measure and then keep going for long enough to make sure all the others are killed too.

Thanks for reposting this Pat1 it is an excellent video that is also good to help people who have not ever had the virus to understand the seriousness of a diagnosis. I have seen it before too and think it’s an excellent tool for educational communications. For those of us who have told family or a few friends these types of videos help them.

High drama and scary things are all over YouTube even herbal retreat things which apparently will cure the universe, you name it it’s there! (Back in peginf days I watched many YouTube offerings nothing offensive fortunately but certainly not proper information)
Those types of videos only serve to water down the serious nature of HCV I believe.

This is an excellent vid. Thanks again
Ariel

At some point along the road to cure we are giving the medication, but there is no virus.

This medication simply hangs around in the tissues and is excreted out of your body every minute of every day. After about 5 days on treatment your body is excreting almost exactly a full dose of medication each day. You are taking more medication to top up this loss, but the level remains relatively constant (it actually looks like a saw tooth pattern with the highest level about 1-2 hours post taking your dose, and the lowest just before you take a new dose.

The reason that we need a period of over treatment is that UND does not mean “there is no virus”. It means there is not enough virus to see and this could represent 0 (as in cured) or something in the range 0.1 – 10 depending on the sensitivity of the test.

During the post treatment period if there is remaining virus the drugs wash out of your body, and the virus regrows. If there is no virus left (ie truly undetected because it is not there) you have SVR.

I am more concerned about what happens to all the remotes…..

When you pick up the remote controller it sprays out remotes, but it only takes 1 remote to turn on the A/C or the TV, so what happens to all the rest?

What if they were just hanging around, plotting?

Sometimes I wake up in a sweat worrying that all these lost remotes will develop a collective consciousness and take over the world, after all, they already know how to control almost everything!

But more seriously if you look at the blood levels as you start taking medication it looks like this:

So the levels increase rapidly to start with then reach a steady state where each day almost all you take in is excreted.

The almost is because you never quite reach steady state but it goes up like 1/2, then and extra 1/4, then an extra 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and if you add all those up you never ever quite get to 1.