Or you were infected as a young child by an adult kissing you years ago. Or you are not infected.
Sometimes low positives indicate new infection, but can also be established infection or false positives.
If the western blot is negative, you are all set. If it is positive, you can't know where the infection is without a lesions somewhere that swab tests positive.
TErri
No, unfortunately I do not. I had three of them (all negative) in the past 1.5 years. The latest one had a index of 1.22.
Does a low positive indicate a recent infection?
Do false positives for HSV1 happen?
Will retesting again with a IGG be worth anything?
I am more worried about location. I read a post here that transmission (even with a sore) wouldn't occur with the lack of friction and heat with a quick kiss. So I have an incident with low risk and one with high risk with one of them being the culprit.
The problem with HSV 1 and the traditional test is that is misses one our of 10 infections. That means that the test could have missed previous infection in you and is now just showing up or it could be a false positive. Which means you could have had HSV 1 for a long time and the tests missed it. Do you happen to have the index values for previous HSV 1 tests that you've had done? We don't have the data on HSV 1 false positives the way we do for HSV 2, unfortunately.
Now that you've had a low positive, I think you will probably feel the need for knowing if this is a false or true positive. That will likely need a western blot to determine a true answer.
Remember that the majority of the US population has HSV 1 infection.
Terri