Ren Galskap posts: The information that Miss London got from the CDC is completely accurate. However, it is also incomplete. Your readers need a little more information.

The PCR-DNA test doesn’t have CDC or FDA approval for diagnosis in adults, but that doesn’t mean that the test is not recommended. According to the National Institutes of Health, viral load tests are appropriate when you need results sooner than you can get with the ELISA/Western blot test. So in spite of the fact that PCR-DNA tests aren’t approved by the CDC and FDA, they are recommended by the NIH for early diagnosis. Here’s why.

The CDC and FDA approved HIV tests all depend on detecting anti-bodies. In other words, the tests won’t work until your body’s immune system starts to respond to the infection by producing anti-bodies that attack the virus. This can take months. The PCR-DNA tests detect the virus itself. That means that the tests will work as soon as the virus establishes itself in your body and has started reproducing. So the PCR-DNA test can be used a lot sooner than the approved tests.

The FDA-approved test used most often is the ELISA/Western Blot test. This is extremely accurate, but you have to wait about three months after infection before you can get accurate results. For a porn performer, that’s too long. PCR-DNA testing works within about twenty eight days. Lara Roxx tested positive twenty two days after working with Darren James.

The reason the PCR-DNA test isn’t approved is that it sometimes returns a false positive. In other words, sometimes it says you have HIV when you don’t. This is pretty scary, and the ELISA/Western blot test doesn’t do this very often, so the CDC and FDA approve the ELISA/Western blot test and not the PCR-DNA test.

PCR-DNA is approved by the FDA for new-born babies with HIV-positive mothers. The reason is that you can’t wait for the baby’s immune system to develop anti-bodies for the virus. You have to find out if the child is infected right away. So the FDA approves PCR-DNA testing of infants if the mother is HIV-positive.

Most people can stop having sex for a few months if they think they may have been infected, so the ELISA/Western blot test is the right test for them. However, porn performers are like infants in that they need to know about an infection as soon as possible. So the PCR-DNA test is the right test for performers, even though the CDC and FDA haven’t approved it as a diagnostic test for adults.

Measuring the viral load instead of the anti-bodies also has the advantage of indicating how likely you are to infect someone else. The higher the viral load, the more likely you are to infect someone else. If you have been infected but your viral load it too low to show up on a PCR-DNA test, you are less likely to infect someone else. So the PCR-DNA test catches you when you start to become dangerous to your sex partners. The ELISA/Western blot test can’t do that because it doesn’t measure viral load.

AIM has never claimed that the viral loads reported in anyone’s test proved that anyone was the source of the HIV infections. Unfortunately, some statements that Sharon Mitchell gave AVN became the basis of an article that gave the impression that the viral loads were the main evidence. As Sharon Mitchell and Ira Levine have since made clear, several factors suggest that Darren James was infected before Roxx, Dee, and Arroyo, and the only known factor that they shared that would have caused the infection was having sex with James. On the basis of that, it is thought likely that James infected the three woman, but I haven’t read a statement from anyone at AIM that said that it had been proven. AIM is obviously not depending on viral loads as proof of anything.