All kinds of things. Check this link out, it's old, but accurate as far as I can see.
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/cjtestfp.htm
HOLY CRAP!!! There are things on there that would give me an HIV reading. Thanks for the list link
No!!! Do not thank anyone for promoting an agenda-driven proselytising pseudoscience website, and
do not believe anything you read on that site for a single second.
Unfortunately there is an internet sub-culture of agenda-driven ‘Google scientists’ who, for some unintelligible reason, deny that the HIV is the cause of AIDS. Sometimes they can’t even get their story straight and deny the existence of HIV in the first place. That website is an example. It involves using all the same tricks that various other mainstream science denialists use – selective quotation mining, quoting out-of-context, ignoring evidence, invoking conspiracies, using anecdotal evidence, using non-peer-reviewed evidence, and so on.
The intension of that list of so-called “Factors Known to Cause False-Positive HIV Antibody Test Results” is to wow you. But a closer look at that reference list reveals the tricks of the trade that these denialists use. For example:
-- Some of the references are reports of specific individual cases of false positive tests, not analysis of the accuracy of tests across wider populations.
-- Some of the references are basic biology investigations of potential new test platforms. Negative evaluations of such reagents say nothing about the applicability and accuracy of existing tests.
-- Some of the references actually conclude that false positives are rare but that they happen at a frequency that requires careful monitoring. Admission of the need for care in diagnosis is hardly evidence of widespread false positives.
-- Some of the references report spikes in false positive tests that were specifically linked to a specific batch of vaccine or specific batch of test kits. Once the vaccine batch/kits were identified and removed, the spike in false positives stopped. Such a report is hardly evidence of a systematic problem with HIV tests.
I could go on. The take-home message is that this list of scientific references does not support the notion that HIV tests produce a large number of false positives. It’s a disingenuous intellectually dishonesty attempt to con people into thinking that these denialists have science on their side. Because, let’s face it, how many people will actually wade through those references when they are presented with so many? Most people without a background in science would take one look at that list and think “wow, point proven”.
The intellectual dishonesty of these people is on a par with those who deny the public health benefits of immunisation and fluoridation. These people are outright dangerous, as are the immunisation denialists.
There are different types of HIV tests – antigen-based, nucleic acid-based and immunological-based. And there are subsets of different tests without each of those categories as well. Each type of test has its own limitations in terms of accuracy/specificity, time, portability and cost. No single test is relied upon for a diagnosis; initial positive results are always confirmed with a secondary different test.
So, having said all that, HIV testing as a whole is very accurate. False positives do occur but they are rare. But don’t take my word for it. Have a look at
peer-reviewed scientific sources of information (rather than a personal agenda-driven website as per the Virus Myth website that was linked to).
Maybe start here:
Screening for HIV: a review of the evidence for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force
Chou et al.
July 2005
Ann. Intern. Med. 143 (1): 55–73.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=15998755
“Screening tests for HIV are extremely (>99%) accurate.”