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How does the body keep up initially? If the body got from viral load N to N/2 despite HIV mutating, then why can't it go from N/2 to N/4? Does the body slow dow

• Zircom 4y ago
  My assumption -- with the initial infection the body creates antibodies to fight off that original strain. As it spreads to more and more cells and churns out copies, it mutates slightly every time it replicates. And then each of those instances replicates and mutates a little more, becoming a bunch of different strains. And while initially the original antibodies will be effective to start with those strains, eventually they'll muttate enough to where you have so many different strains where suddenly the antibodies aren't working anymore and that's probably the point where the immune systems gets overloaded trying to produce antibodies for all these different strains, and as soon as it catches up it all becomes worthless, because in the meantime a ton of other different strains have mutated in the meantime, and so on and so on. tl;dr snowball effect
• derefr 4y ago
  Perhaps the strain that spreads well is easy for antibodies to kill; but mutates easily into a variant that doesn't spread very well, but is very hard to kill.
• throwaway742 4y ago
  Not an expert here, but my layman's understanding is that as it is a disease that attacks the immune system the bodies ability to fight off each new generation is gradually diminished until eventually it is not able to fight off the new mutations any more.