HIV/AIDs Testing o.0?
Monday, February 8th, 2010 at
8:22 pm
What do you support and why?
do you believe in mandatory HIV/AIDS testing….. like in jobs or schools :s
Filed under: Diseases And Conditions
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No, I don’t. There is a wide window between the time someone first gets infected and the time someone develops the antibody that the test checks for. False negatives can give false security. That’s why blood centers (where you give blood) ask all those questions about risky behavior (sex, jail, drug use) because participation in risky behavior can indicate the possibility of infection even if the test comes back negative.
On the other side, the HIV antibody test also has a high incidence of false positives. All tests that come back positive initially will have a confirmatory test performed (kind of like an HIV DNA test) before the results can be called truly positive.
It is for both of these reasons that I don’t think mandatory HIV/AIDS testing should be required as part of job screening or school admission testing.