Naomi,
There is alot of information written up on false-positive results from
antibody screening tests.  In regard to HIV/AIDS, mother to child transmission,
there is a book called "Mother to Child Transmission of HIV and It's Prevention
with AZT and Nevirapine:  A Critical Analysis of the Evidence" by
Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al.  It is a hard read but worth the effort.  There is the book by
Christine Maggiore called, "What if everything you thought you knew about
AIDS WAS WRONG?"  This is a well referenced book.  I have found some information
from the Baylor College of Medicine HIV Nursing Curriculum (2001).

I do not know the HIV false-positive rate in pregnant women.  There are some
60-80 factors known to cause positive results on HIV antibody tests, one of
them being pregnancy in multiparous women.  The Maggiore book has references for
the factors known to cause positive results.  In a paper that I have from a
UK web site about hiv tests the following is stated about the Western Blot,
"Specific risk factors identified among women for presence of an interderminate
WB test include parity and also presence of autoantibodies..."  "Enzyme-linked
immunoassay(ELISA)--"In a population with a low prevalence for HIV-1 (no risk
factors), most positive EIA test results will be false positives."  "The PCR
for perinatally acquired HIV-1 infections--The sensitivity of this assay is
sufficient to detect about half of infections in the first month of life and
almost all infections after 6 months..."
http://www.commhlth.medic.ukm.my/aids/TESTHIV.htm

One test kit from Roche Diagnostic Systems states:

"The Amplicor HIV-1 Monitor test is not intended to be used as a screening
test for HIV or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV infection."
http://www.the durbandeclaration.org

Hope this answers some of your questions. Maggiore states, "A person is
diagnosed with AIDS if they have one or more of the 29 official AIDS-defining
conditions and if they also test positive for antibodies associated with HIV." The
Baylor College of Medicine HIV Nursing Curriculum states the following
(page16), "Diagnosing HIV in adults follows specific principles.  Both clinical and
laboratory diagnostic criteria have been developed to determine positive and
negative diagnoses."  Infants and children are also diagnosed in this way in the
text from Baylor.
Valerie W. McClain, IBCLC






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