Transmission

[Soccerfan85]

Considering I have no clue when I tested positive for HSV2, could have been last month, last year or 3 years ago. I’ve been having sex with someone for at least 9 months now, sometimes protected, sometimes unprotected. I got a positive HSV2 test last week, and she’s the last person I had sex with but her results came back negative. Even if I had a recent infection weeks or months before our last encounter, why isn’t she testing positive? Is it possible I’m a false positive?

[Terri Warren]

In order to help you sort out whether this might be a false positive, I need the index value of your test – the number that goes along with the positive. Did it have a number?

Terri

[Soccerfan85]

13.3

[Soccerfan85]

Following up

[Terri Warren]

So that is almost certainly a well established infection, no need to confirm. I have seen false positives higher than that, but rarely. And we also cannot know when you were infected.
Herpes is not always passed to sexual partners, certainly not when men use condoms with uninfected women as condoms reduce transmission by 96% from men to women.

And if she happened to become infected in the past 3 months, it may not show up on her IgG test quite yet.

Terri

[Author]

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