STD Testing Question

[bh777]

I am a 25 year old homosexual male. I recently had a STD screen done and everything came back negative. I have read that you need to wait 3 months from your last sexual experience to get tested. My last sexual experience involved receiving unprotected oral sex and giving oral sex for about 30 seconds (he did not ejaculate) and our genitals may have touched for a few seconds here and there. I have read that there is little to no chance of contracting HIV through oral sex only.  My my only other sexual experience within the last year was 5-5 1/2 months ago with the same person.  The date that my blood was drawn to take the test was short of exactly 3 months by about a week.  I was given a blood test for HIV, syphilis, HPV, hepatitis B and HSV2.  Also had a ureathral swab to check for chlamydia and gonorrhea. Should I be confident in the results or will being just short of 3 months make any difference? Also, was I at any reasonable risk for HIV?

[Edward W Hook, MD]

Welcome to the Forum.  There is not a need to wait 3 months to test for most STDs.  Testing for gonorrhea, chlamydia and NGU can be performed 3 days after exposure.  Syphilis testing is definitive at 3 months, as is testing for hepatitis B.  In both cases the infections are quite rare and results as early as 6-8 weeks are highly, but not perfectly reliable.  For HIV, testing at 8 weeks gives reliable results.  In the absence of lesions, we do not recommend blood tests for HSV as the likelihood of a falsely positive test result is probably higher than the likelihood of infection.

As for the exposures you describe, few STDs are spread by either giving or receiving oral sex an HIV is not one of them.  

I hope these comments are helpful.  EWH

[Edward W Hook, MD]

We get many questions about the meaning of HIV test results at different time points.  This is now confused by the availability of a variety of different types of tests.  The traditional and most widely used tests for HIV are tests for antibodies to HIV which are available both as so-called "rapid" or point of care tests which can be done in the clinic and laboratory based antibody tests. For all practical purposes both of these types of test perform comparably and provide accurate information on the presence or absence of HIV infection in virtually everyone at 8 weeks following exposure.  The recommendations for testing at 3 and even 6 months are the result of two factors- data from older tests no longer used (you really do not need to worry about which generation of tests you were tested with, at this time virtually all tests are far more sensitive that they were even 2-3 years ago when the 3 month recommendation was made) and secondly, the fact that some, mostly governmental agencies which have to provide recommendations for virtually everyone without the sort of interactions such as those you get with your doctor or on personalized sites such as this one, feel the cannot "afford" to be wrong and therefore make recommendations and guidelines which leave most people unnecessarily nervous for 4-6 weeks longer than the 6-8 weeks it takes virtually everyone to develop HIV antibodies.   I hope this clarifies things.  EWH

[bh777]

Thank you for your response.  I did not know that you can get accurate results for HIV at 8 weeks.  I have heard conflicting information regarding this (I have been told you have to wait 3-6 months for 100% accurate testing). So if all my test results were negative, I should have no worries? Sorry, just trying to put my mind at ease...