I once took an STD test series for all the typical STDs and everything came back negative….except for HSV-1 (cold sores aka oral herpies). It returned an ‘abnormal’ result of 1.05….not at the level of true positive (1.09 or higher) but not at ‘normal’ of 0.9 or lower. Of course I freaked, had a few days of intense anxiety and suicidal thoughts, then decided to get a second test. This second one came back full normal. WTF? Please explain how this works.
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It’s estimated that 50-80% of the US population has HSV1, testing positive for it is nothing to freak out about. Only a small percentage of those who are positive actually have cold sores. HSV is a skin rash that has sadly been highly stigmatized for no real reason.
As far as your question goes, what type of test did you have? It sounds like it was an IgG antibody blood test, which is a mass based test and prone to inaccuracies. Basically, less accurate tests are cheap and easy to run in mass, whereas more sensitive tests like affinity based tests are much more sensitive, but also much more costly. For routine screening purposes it doesn’t make sense to order the most sensitive test available when most people are negative
The root issue is why you “freaked” over it. Saying ur suicidal over it is ur right bc it’s ur experience but just as a reminder… people reading this might also have it n I can’t imagine someone reinforcing a wack stigma is gonna help.
All medical tests (all tests in general, really) can produce false positives or false negatives. Your body is a very complicated system, it changes over time, and it isn’t quite the same as anyone else’s body. Similarly, most diseases are complicated and can develop in different ways in different people. For example, a disease might usually be associated with a specific substance appearing in your blood, but there might be a rare form of the disease that doesn’t produce that substance, or there might be something completely different going on in your body that produces that substance without the disease being present.
On top of that, there are inevitably some mistakes. The person carrying out the test might forget a step, or they might mix your sample up with someone else’s, or a machine might have a fault. If the lab is run well, these mistakes should be very rare, but nobody is infallible.
Anyway, different tests can have very different false positive and false negative rates. Ideally, medical professionals are supposed to put them into context and explain how definitive they are. Often they will combine multiple different tests before deciding on a diagnosis.
Most people have HSV-1, in my country the number is over 70%. Some people will only test positive if they have an active infection. Many people will have HSV-1 and never actually find out. It’s just a bit of genetic luck as to whether you will present symptoms or not.
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