Sorry about that!
I don’t recommend the immunoblot, no. It does not give an index value like the Herpeselect. The index value allows us to sort out any low positives that may be false positives. the immunoblot test is a color change strip and though we used it years ago as our test of choice, we stopped using it completely when the herpeselect ELISA version became available that allowed us to look more carefully at that low positive population. I shudder to think we may have told people who had a slight color change in the HSV 2 region of the test strip that they had herpes and did not, simply because the test did not allow such a distinction. If you do the herpeselect and it is a low positive, then we can think about the need for a western blot.
Hope that helps! Do let me know if I’ve missed anything else
Terri