Most people develop detectable HIV antibodies within 23 to 90 days after transmission. If a person takes an HIV test during the window period, it’s likely they’ll receive a negative result NATs can usually tell if you have an HIV infection 10 to 33 days after exposure, while antigen/antibody tests can tell 18 to 45 days after exposure. How Long Can It Take to Realize You Have HIV? See a healthcare provider if you have symptoms of HIV and think you may have been exposed to HIV. HIV PEP, or post-exposure prophylaxis, is a short course of HIV medicines taken very soon after a possible exposure to HIV to prevent the virus from taking hold in your body. You must start it within 72 hours (3 days) after a possible exposure to HIV, or it won’t work. Two lines indicate that HIV antibodies were detected and that you may be HIV positive. If the home test is positive, a follow-up laboratory test will need to be done to confirm the results National testing guidelines set out a 90-day window for HIV self tests. Blood tests that you send off to a lab and those available at sexual health clinics have a testing window of 45 days. In practical terms, this means that a self test tells you what your HIV status was 90 days ago, while a blood test tells you what your status was 45 days ago. PEP is a series of pills you can start taking very soon after you’ve been exposed to HIV that lowers your chances of getting it. But you have to start PEP within 72 hours, or 3 days, after you were exposed to HIV, or it won’t work. The sooner you start, the better it works — every hour matters. You take PEP 1-2 times a day for at least 28 This laboratory test can usually detect HIV infection 10 to 33 days after exposure. The test is expensive and not used for routine screening, but it may be used in some cases to detect early infection. This is the same type of test used to measure viral load and guide treatment for people living with HIV. Many testing sites now use rapid oral HIV Incubation Period: the incubation period of HIV is between two to four weeks after being exposed to the virus. That’s when symptoms like the flu start appearing and can last for many weeks. HIV Window Period: window periods can differ between a virus to testing technique and another. An HIV antibody test would need a period of 30 to 90 But this means that around 4/1000 times, the HIV test will be positive even in a person without HIV — the prevalence of acute HIV in most screened populations is way lower than that. As a result, in many centers (including ours), most of the reactive HIV screens with negative confirmatory tests ultimately end up being false-positive screens. Many people who have been infected with HIV are unaware that they have been infected until years after exposure to the virus. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, of the estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States, 1 in 7 do not know that they have been infected. dsRGqz1.