V Worried about HIV infection

[misterlister]

Hi there,

I've read a lot of questions and responses on this forum and even though I think i'm ok, i'm still pretty worried..

So my situation is this, I'm male and hetero and live in the UK. I had a relationship at the start of this year where I had unprotected sex with another girl, who told me she practiced safe sex etc. (I know this was a mistake). We had sex 5 or 6 times I guess. Around that same time, I got ill with ars-like symptoms, for about 2 days, fever, sore throat etc.. I didn't think anything about it at the time.

Now fast forward on to the present. I'm in a new relationship and (again against my better judgment), had sex with this new girl unprotected. Now, it's a few weeks later and she has ars-like symptoms, sore throat, fever etc.

So I spent the last few days stressing out that I had HIV, so I went to get tested yesterday. They used an oraquick advance test and it came back negative.

I know the test is supposedly 99.8% accurate but i'm still stressing because of my new girlfriend being sick. I'm trying to work out what else it could be.. especially because i'm not sick..

[misterlister]

To be honest, i'm not worried that my new girlfriend gave me HIV, i'm worried that I gave it to her. Basically because she got these ars-like symptoms about two weeks after first having sex with me. The very bad timing of these symptoms just made me very very paranoid.

I get the impression that my logic is flawed ie: "confirmation bias", every piece of evidence seems to point to me having HIV and I have trouble acknowledging the evidence that points against it.

Thanks for the advice anyway. I'll post updates if anything significant happens.

[Edward W Hook, MD]

You are overeacting.  Please remember that average persons gets at least 2-3 non-specific viral illnesses a year.  When you are going from day to day worrying as to whether "things" are "OK" or not, you are more likely to notice such illnesses.  For you to be worrying after having a negative test is a bit silly.

One caveat.  You do not mention dates.  Your negative test is assurance that you did not get HIV from your former GF.  As for the current one, I do not know how long it has been since you first or last had sex with her.  Having provided that qualification, I still maintain that everything you ahd told me suggests that your risk is tiny. Again, I would not worry.  EWH