Ebola Test Gives False Negatives Washington’s Blog

“Below are two articles on the Ebola test, apparently it can give false negatives. Not exactly news you want to hear. Lets hope this is something rare.” Admin

On July 15, Omeonga’s boss walked into his office at St. Joseph Catholic Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia full of worry. The hospital director told Omeonga he had shaken hands with a man who was later diagnosed with Ebola, and now he was feeling ill—the director had been vomiting, had a headache, and was running a high fever. But two days later, when the diagnostic test came back negative, that worry was banished, and Omeonga and his colleagues began caring for the director as they would a typhoid or malaria patient. “We wore gloves, but we were not very strict at all.”

A week later, the director’s symptoms got worse, and he was tested again. This time, it came back positive for Ebola—the first test was a false negative [i.e. the test erroneously showed that the person did not have Ebola, when he did]. Suddenly, everyone who had cared for him was a possible Ebola case. The hospital became a quarantine zone. The director died on August 2, the same day Omeonga began to feel sick. Of the 20 health workers who had been in contact with him during that week, 15 came down with Ebola a short while later, including Omeonga. Nine of Omeonga’s colleagues died. He and five others survived.

The Ebola test: let the test’s inventor speak

Amidst the hysteria about Ebola, one stubborn fact sits like a rock: everything depends upon being able to accurately diagnose Ebola in each patient.

And then it follows: you must examine the test that is being used to diagnose Ebola. Is it accurate? Does it have flaws? Is it being applied correctly?

Because, if there is a serious problem with the test, the whole house of cards collapses. The entire narrative about Ebola is fatally flawed.

Last week, when a man was admitted to a hospital in Dallas, the CDC held a press conference. CDC Director Tom Frieden stated that this patient had been diagnosed with Ebola—with a test that is “highly accurate. It’s a PCR test of blood.”

This is, indeed, the test of choice for Ebola.

However, as I’ve written, the PCR test has problems. It is open to errors. One of those errors occurs right at the beginning of the procedure: