Andrew Stimpson: Science Hero

[CFLarsen]

Attaboy!

 

[Camillus]

Unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) it appears that Mr Stimpson may never have had HIV in the first place. Todays Grauniad (on its Health pages) is reporting:

Doctors at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where his tests were carried out, now believe he probably hasn't recovered from the disease but never had it in the first place, and that his first results were false positives

This whole story is somewhat garbled and I suspect we will have to wait sometime before we find out exactly what is going on.

 

[CFLarsen]

If anything, it will surely question the value of HIV testing.

If the tests he went through are found to be inadequate, then we got a biiiiiig problem.....

 

[Rolfe]

If anything, it will surely question the value of HIV testing.

If the tests he went through are found to be inadequate, then we got a biiiiiig problem.....

Getting 100% specificity in any testing system is very difficult indeed. Given the number of people tested, some occurrence of false results is almost inevitable.

The only thing that was unusual about this case is that the original reports were saying that they had actually ruled out a false positive in the first test. If this is in fact not the case, nothing to see here, move along folks.

Rolfe.

 

[Rasmus]

Unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) it appears that Mr Stimpson may never have had HIV in the first place. Todays Grauniad (on its Health pages) is reporting:

Doctors at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where his tests were carried out, now believe he probably hasn't recovered from the disease but never had it in the first place, and that his first results were false positives

This whole story is somewhat garbled and I suspect we will have to wait sometime before we find out exactly what is going on.

Does it say anywhere *why* they belive that?

Rasmus.

 

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

Pls reread, I edited. Concentrate on yjay healing agent's mentionings. I shall study AIDS deeply now.

Do have any idea about fiery red(not red or deep red) tongue & lips, sometimes firey lines on tongue with yello base?

You're dying. It's probably more efficient to phone the undertaker yourself than trouble the doctor. Only a homeopath can save you.

 

[sputnik]

This is my first post

Has anybody seen the original (paper copy) News of the World article of 13th November?

I had to laugh as soon as I saw it! It shows excerpts from the two results documents. They have been printed using different systems, however they both have three columns headed with different dates.

The newer negative results show a summary "NegativeA" underneath each date column.

The original "positive" results show a blank column for the first date, "POSITIVE TEXT @ POSITIVE * @ POSITIVE TEXT @" for the second, and a blank column for the third date.

This looks to me like a typical mail-merge field corruption in a Microsoft Word document or Access report, showing up the underlying text formatting code.

So its all down to an ordinary NHS IT systems glitch. I would guess that the large amount of true negative results are printed and despatched using a mass mail merge job, handled by junior NHS admin staff and not well scrutinised before being posted.

The positives I would imagine are handled in a more careful manner.

I'm surprised nobody seems to have spotted this yet! However, the original NHS trust is now saying the guy was negative all along.

I'll post a scan if anybody wants it!

 

[Rolfe]

I don't see how it could be as simple as that. It was reported that a lot of cross-checking had been done before the original announcement was made. That doesn't of course mean that the announcement was correct, but surely if it was as simple as a reporting glitch, that would be the first thing to have been noticed. (It would be, in my laboratory, if a result was queried.)

Rolfe.