In our support group there was discussion about failed tests and false negatives. One member asked for a recent medical citation that would attest to this so she could talk with her doctor about why she still felt Valley Fever symptoms when off her antifungal drugs, even without positive antibody titer tests.
I located one such citation. Medical journal articles are at their best when they bluntly describe the problem:
The false-negative rate can be as high as 50% to 70%, with 5% of symptomatic patients never showing detectable antibody levels.
Since medical education on Valley Fever is rarely state of the art, this may be useful information for you to share with your own doctor.
The article was actually focused on new detection methods. While this method is not now commonly available for Valley Fever patients, it may also be adapted to vaccine studies and cancer diagnosis. See more in this article:
Heiss K, Heidepriem J, Fischer N, et al. Rapid Response to Pandemic Threats: Immunogenic Epitope Detection of Pandemic Pathogens for Diagnostics and Vaccine Development Using Peptide Microarrays. J Proteome Res. 2020;19(11):4339-4354. doi:10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00484
Image Credit:
License: Creative Commons 3 – CC BY-SA 3.0
Required attribution: Alpha Stock Images – http://alphastockimages.com/
Original Author: Nick Youngson – http://www.nyphotographic.com/
Original Image: http://www.picserver.org/d/diagnosis.html