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June 29, 2022, 09:13:55 am
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On Hepatitis C Treatment / Re: Hepatitis C: Questions
« Last post by Mugwump on June 07, 2022, 11:44:48 am »Good to see some action on this forum again. I have seen quite a few false positive AB tests done here in Canada over the years since HCV was isolated and an antibody test was patented. The HCV antibody tests of the past were terrible and caused many people to panic including 2 members of my family who are not infected and most likely never were. A few friends of mine from way back did get tested when they heard I had HCV even though there was no possibility of my infecting them, one of them tested positive for antibodies and upon retesting found that it was a false positive. The other tested AB negative.
So the old standard of doing the AB test at least twice still applies instead of immediately rushing off to do an expensive PCR RNA immediately and scaring the crap out of people who are most likely not serum positive at all and never have been!
Because there are still a fair number of labs using the old and now relatively cheap serum AB tests for HCV and those tests are at best flakey, just perhaps false positive results are a little more common than one would believe.
Just perhaps false positives have become a case of the more cheap patented HCV AB test kits one particular company pumps out the more the stock value and bottom line of the firm increases.
So the old standard of doing the AB test at least twice still applies instead of immediately rushing off to do an expensive PCR RNA immediately and scaring the crap out of people who are most likely not serum positive at all and never have been!
Because there are still a fair number of labs using the old and now relatively cheap serum AB tests for HCV and those tests are at best flakey, just perhaps false positive results are a little more common than one would believe.
Just perhaps false positives have become a case of the more cheap patented HCV AB test kits one particular company pumps out the more the stock value and bottom line of the firm increases.