First, I have seen ethnicity related to false positives with high false positive values, yes.
What are the western blot looks for 16 herpes anybody proteins and four must be present to be declared positive, the IgG test looks for a single antibody protein that’s different between HSV one and two. This makes the IgG test vulnerable to false positives if the test picks up a protein that it thinks is related to herpes but is indeed not.
The IgG test is completely automated where the western blot is done by hand and read by three virology technicians to be declared the result.
Terri