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
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