HIV Tests Are Not HIV Tests. WHAT?

HIV tests do not detect HIV or HIV antibodies.  HIV tests detect antibodies.  Period.  Test manufacturers claim that their tests are 99 percent accurate for sensitivity and specificity.

SENSITIVITY measures how often a test is positive when you already know what you are testing for is present.  SPECIFICITY expresses how often a test is positive when a patient DOES NOT have the condition.

In all HIV test literature, sensitivity and specificity are not based on measurements of the test against an isolated virus, but is a concordant measure between two tests that do not detect HIV or HIV antibodies.  Careful examination of the manufacturer’s label information makes this clear contrary to their claims of sensitivity and specificity of 99.9 percent.  The vast majority of these reported measures of accuracy have nothing to do with whether HIV is present, but how well one test performs as compared to other tests already on the market.  These measures of accuracy refer to the concordance between two tests; namely, how often a new test says a sample is positive when one already on the market says it is positive (sensitivity), and how often it is negative (specificity).  Given the fact that all HIV antibody tests are based on the same molecular principles and built from the same portfolio of basic molecular building blocks, their remarkable concordance is not surprising.

However, even if two different tests demonstrate 100 percent concordance, that does not justify the use of either for purposes other than what they have been validated and approved for.  By analogy, if two different manufacturers were to construct two different timepieces using the same specifications for the gears and wheels, only to put them in different casings, it is very likely that these two clocks would perform quite similarly.  However, even if there were greater than 99.9 percent concordance between these two timepieces, one cannot conclude that either clock measures time accurately.

HIV tests are so notoriously inaccurate that ALL FDA-approved HIV test package inserts warn clinicians that persons who test positive can only be “PRESUMED to be infected.”

“Clinically indicated” means that diagnosticians must rule out dozens of other conditions and factors that are known to cause false positive HIV test results.  Some of those conditions include:  

• Normal human ribonucleoproteins (48, 13)
• Pregnancy (58, 53, 13, 43, 36, 85, 92)
• Pregnant Latina women (97)
• Receptive anal sex (39, 64)
• Maternal antibodies carried over to uninfected infants  (87) 
• Naturally-occurring antibodies (5, 19)
• Rheumatoid arthritis (14, 62, 53)
• “Sticky” blood (in Africans) (38, 34, 40)
• T-cell leukocyte antigen antibodies (48, 13) 
• Blood transfusions, multiple blood transfusions (63, 36, 13, 49, 43, 41)
• Hemodialysis/renal failure (56, 16, 41, 10, 49)
• Organ transplantation (1, 36)
• Renal transplantation (35, 9, 48, 13, 56)
• Flu and other vaccines (30, 11, 3, 20, 13, 43, 72, 76 28, 21, 40, 43 67 40, 107, 108, 109) 
• Diabetes (101)
• Drug abuse — Injection drug use (parenteral substance abuse & OTHER (86)
• Hemophilia (10, 49)
• Multiple sclerosis (86)  (105)
• Primary biliary cirrhosis (43, 53, 13, 48, 104)
• Renal (kidney) failure (48, 23, 13)
• Rheumatoid arthritis (36)
• Epstein-Barr virus (37, 90)
• Flu (36)
• Malaria (6, 12, 75, 88)
• Other retroviruses (8, 55, 14, 48, 13)
• Stevens-Johnson syndrome (9, 48, 13)
• Syphilis  (101)
• Trypanosoma cruzi  (Chagas Disease) (88)
• Tuberculosis (25)
• Upper respiratory tract infection [cold or flu] (11)

*republished from omsj.org

* Also read more by Henry H. Bauer, Ph.D. http://www.jpands.org/vol15no1/bauer.pdf