Online forums abound with stories like Lauren’s, of people who request herpes tests alongside those of other STDs and are shellshocked by the results. That high failure rate isn’t, however, always communicated to patients. Meanwhile, the CDC and the US Preventive Services Task Force concur that the most widely available herpes test, called HerpeSelect, should not be used to screen asymptomatic people because of its high risk of false positives: Up to 1 in 2 positive tests could be false, according to the USPSTF’s most recent guidelines. The kind of test used to diagnose Lauren, an IgM test, has long been rejected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but is still used by some clinicians. Most of these people, however, don’t have obvious symptoms and wouldn’t know they were carriers without blood tests.īut blood tests can be highly unreliable. Genital herpes, predominantly caused by herpes simplex virus type 2, is a sexually transmitted disease that’s very common - 1 in 6 people aged 14 to 49 in the United States have HSV-2, and this number goes up with age. “And that was just to try to calm my own anxiety, but it would only really make it worse.” ![]() ![]() In the six months that passed between the tests, the mistake led her to keep a romance at bay and left her anxiously patrolling her health.“Every tingle I would get in my leg or any kind of itch down there would just set me off,” sending her into a new flurry of research, she said. But after weeks of Googling, chatting with members of online herpes forums, and reading scientific papers, she asked for a different test, which eventually confirmed her suspicion - her herpes diagnosis was wrong. Or rather, she believed she did, after a request for sexually transmitted disease testing returned a positive result. Herpes is a lifelong infection, but Lauren had it only for six tumultuous months.
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