How Reliable Are HIV Antibody Tests?
Serious challenges of the specificity of the HIV antibody tests have been raised by several researchers (Papadopulos-Eliopulos 1993). Currently the ELISA is used as a screening test and the Western Blot as a confirmatory test. If the rate of HIV seroconversion after a needle stick is truly 1 in 333, then extremely specific tests would be needed, in which false positives would occur in much less than 1 in 333 tests (less than 0.3%). Papadopulos-Eliopulos et al. (1993) argue that since no one has completely isolated the HIV virus, the specificity of these tests is completely unkown. Only by checking the accuracy of the tests against a “gold standard” of purified HIV can specificity be established. All available electron micrographic pictures of HIV show impure solutions in which what is said to be HIV only represents a small minority of the visible elements (Verney-Elliott 1999, de Harven 1998). Even if the tests had been based on such a gold standard, however, false positives would stil
