Hi, I had a protected sex with an unknown woman I met. I started having really bad headaches (which I never experienced before), little fever and joint/muscle pain 5-6 weeks after for a week. I was worried so I had my blood tested 8 weeks after the intercourse which came HIV negative. However later I came to know that sometime HIV cannot be detected till 3 months. Should I be retested for HIV?

It is great that you used protection as condoms work really well in preventing HIV.

There are no symptoms that are caused by just having HIV. The symptoms people get with a HIV seroconversion illness are common symptoms that can be caused by many different conditions, for example the common cold. Just treat the symptoms as a reminder, you are concerned about what happened and it would be good to go for a HIV test.

The HIV tests we use in BC Canada would be very accurate at 8 weeks; we find they are 95% accurate at 6 weeks but that it can take up to 3 months to get a final result.

You probably have nothing to worry about given that you used protection and had a negative HIV test at 8 weeks but I find if someone is really worried about what happened having closure by getting a negative HIV test at 3 months can bring good peace of mind.

We also recommend a final syphilis blood test at 3 months so you could get a blood test for HIV at the same time.

Please leave a comment to let us know if this answers your question or if you need more information.

Health Nurse

For other readers, please feel free to leave a comment, or let us know if this was helpful.

This answer was posted on October 5, 2014.

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