Is it possible to still be negative????

Hello and welcome to e health forum.

Antibody tests are extremely accurate when it comes to detecting the presence of HIV antibodies. ELISA tests are very sensitive and so will detect very small amounts of HIV antibody. This high level of sensitivity however, means that their specificity (ability to distinguish HIV antibodies from other antibodies) is slightly lowered. There is therefore a very small chance that a result could come back as ‘false positive’.

A false positive result means that although a person may not be infected with HIV, their antibody test may come back positive.

All positive test results are followed up with a confirmatory test, such as:

A Western blot assay – One of the oldest but most accurate confirmatory antibody tests.

An indirect immunofluorescence assay – Like the Western blot, but it uses a microscope to detect HIV antibodies.

A line immunoassay - Reduces the chance of sample contamination and is as accurate as the Western Blot.

A second ELISA – The second test will usually be a different commercial brand and will use a different method of detection to the first.

When two tests are combined, the chance of getting an inaccurate result is less than 0.1%.

Since the recent HIV ELISA test is positive, the next step would be a Western blot test, to confirm the status of infection.

I hope this helps.