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Community Viral Load

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of AIDS

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Definition

Community viral load (CVL) is defined as an aggregate population-level biomarker of a community’s viral burden over a specific time period and has recently been operationalized as (1) an indicator of a community’s level of infectiousness and transmission probability; (2) a measure of the effectiveness of combination of HIV prevention, care, and treatment interventions; and (3) a proximal marker for HIV incidence and potential epidemic propagation.

Background

Accumulating evidence at the individual level has demonstrated both the direct relationship between plasma HIV viremia and HIV transmission and the positive effects of antiretroviral treatment (ART)-mediated virologic suppression in reducing or eliminating perinatal and sexual HIV transmission (Dickover et al. 1996; Garcia et al. 1999; Quinn et al. 2000; Wawer et al. 2005) (Chung et al. 2007; Cohen et al. 2011; Connor et al. 1994; Garcia et al. 1999; Mofenson et al. 1999). It is hypothesized, analogous to the individual...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HIV/AIDS and Infectious Diseases, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Moupali Das

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  1. Moupali Das
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Correspondence to Moupali Das .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Cell & Molecular Biology, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    Thomas J. Hope

  2. Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, USA

    Mario Stevenson

  3. University of California, San Diego Dept. Pathology, La Jolla, California, USA

    Douglas Richman

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Das, M. (2014). Community Viral Load. In: Hope, T., Stevenson, M., Richman, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of AIDS. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9610-6_122-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9610-6_122-1

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