What are the psychosocial ramifications for blood donors of knowledge of a positive test result?
There are three approaches to detecting HIV infection. Listed in decreasing order of difficulty and expense, they are: Detection of the virus by culturing it. Detection of antigens elaborated by the virus and present in blood. Detection of HIV-specific antibodies that are produced by the infected person’s immune system. Two tests mainly support the entire current testing program. Both are of the third type. ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) reacts to the presence of antibodies in the donor’s blood, showing a more intense color as larger quantities of the antibodies are present in the serum. A positive reaction is recorded where the observed intensity exceeds a cutoff value set by the manufacturer of the test kit. If the cutoff value is set low, so that relatively faint specimens are recorded as positive, the chance of detecting HIV cases with low levels of antibody are increased. At the same time, such a low threshold increases the chance of recording as positive samples that d
