P Young Testing It Out

Getting tested for HIV at VCTs is quite quick, taking at most 5 to 15 minutes to find out whether or not you have antibodies for the virus. What you see P. Young doing on the right is placing 50 µL of whole blood or plasma onto an absorbant test paper. The filter paper has viral antigen in a specific area (a strip) attached to it already. So, if blood that travels through the filter paper has antibodies against HIV, the antibodies will then bind to the viral antigens along that strip and change color. The change of color means that the individual is seropositive and has produced antibodies in response to HIV infection. However, in the case of infants—they can produce a false positive since they might have residual maternal antibodies. I don’t want to get into further details. Anyways, there’s actually 3 types of rapid HIV tests used here—Determine, produced by Abbot Laboratories, Stat Pak by Chembio and Uni-gold by Trinity Biotech. Determine is supposed to be the most sensitive but not always the most accurate, while the Stat Pak and Uni-gold kits are a bit more specific. The protocol here is if you’re tested negative with the Determine kit—then you’re seronegative. However, if you test positive for Determine, a second test with the Stat Pak is done just to make sure—and if there is incongruous results from the first two tests, then Uni-gold is used to break the tie. Anyways, I wasn't really sure if I was allowed to have P. Young do some of this work. But I figured I didn't want him to be bored and just hang around and not do anything--besides, my co-workers didn't seem to mind and had a great time talking to him. I don't think he was in any danger--I made sure he wore gloves!