The quick answer for why some answers on the site use different words, is that each advocate brings their individual interpretation to each question.<\/p>\n
Generally, because we focus on research, the answers should be the same, but the wording may differ.<\/p>\n
The longer answer, especially relating to this example, is that, scientifically, it is not possible to ‘prove a negative’ – you cannot prove something has not happened. Being very careful with words means that, a scientist will rarely say something ‘can never happen’ just that is its ‘very unlikely’ or even ‘very very unlikely’. Or they may qualify it with a number such as one in a million – or one in 10 million etc.<\/p>\n
With HIV test results, very occasionally, cases are reported when someone seroconverts outside the normal window period – perhaps 6 or 9 months after exposure. In practice this is so rare that a negative result after 3 months, confirmed at 6 months, is accepted as a negative result.<\/p>\n
In the context of the questions we get – which are generally from worried people, who are often at very low or even zero risk of having caught HIV – the clearest message is that they should belive the results and they are negative.<\/p>\n
Scientifically speaking – if you are being absolutely precise to never be proved wrong – then “safely assume not infected” is more accurate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your service is great!! Thanks.<\/p>\n
However, I have seen different answers by different people in response to similar questions. Some of you guys will say “definitely not infected” while others would say “safely assume not infected”.<\/p>\n
Why the diiferent approach, when most of it is regarding testing after the window period?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","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\/296","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24272,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions\/24272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}