You don’t need an antibody test because you have a positive HSV 1 swab test. If you take antiviral medicine, the medicine will kind of take the place of the immune response that keeps the virus in check and eventually you will develop antibody though it can take a while while on medicine. If you want to stop Valtrex that’s fine, no problem. Transferring herpes to another part of your body is really uncommon and not something that I worry about very often thus my response. Also you could be infected orally already and just not have any symptoms there, hard to know for sure. but really, you may be worrying about this perhaps more than you need to (getting it in a new place)
The problem with the HSV 1 test is with false negatives – it misses about 1-2 out of 10 infections. There is NOT a problem with false positives.
There are many parts to the human immune response, not just antibody. That’s just one “side” of the immune response – the other kinds of immune response are also important. If people easily got infected a new locations on their bodies, we would see people with herpes all over the place, particularly children who touch cold sores and their genitals all the time. but we don’t see that in children and we don’t see it adults very often at all, and when we do, the most likely explanation is that they acquired infection at two locations at the same sexual encounter.
Does that help?
Terri