Thank you for your question.<\/p>\n
Putting the blood into a reagent would not affect the test at all. The reagent would stop the sample from clotting or drying out before the lab had chance to use it.<\/p>\n
The tests used in GUM clinics look for antigens which are proteins on the surface of the virus and antibodies, which are generated as part of an immune response to the presence of HIV. Neither of these markers are \u2018alive\u2019. This means if there was virus present and it died it would not affect the accuracy of the test.<\/p>\n
Once this blood is in the lab it will be run through a machine which will look for both the antibodies and the antigens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hello,<\/p>\n
I went to a GUM clinic today and got a full STI test done, all is fine. However, I have one questions which I thought you could help me with. They took my blood the standard way and then she emptied the blood into a disc container saying she prepared it for the lab.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m slightly worried that the virus might have died while swapping the blood over. Would the test still be able to pick up the DNA, proteins, antigens, cells (don\u2019t know what they\u2019re called) can you help me on this? How is the blood checked once in the lab?<\/p>\n
Thanks in advance for the reply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-hiv-testing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24450,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions\/24450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}