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Originally Posted by Crompsin
Pfft, I'm not even a woman and that scares me. "Worker fatigue" huh? False negatives are supposed to be a fraction of false positives in most tests and "significant number" sounds all bad.
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Of course, different studies and different methods yield slightly different numbers, and I wont pretend to be an expert in medicine, as I was just part of the team that was reviewing the numbers of the existing literature and so on. But let me clarify a bit here: improper "sampling" of the cervix during a pap smear, or improper handling of the sample allowing it to dry off before analysis leads to what some have found to be a 20% false negative rate overall.
Now, the false negative rate is for HPV, not cervical cancer, so if women are screened often enough, or if their tests also include hpv-dna testing, that means that even in the case of a false negative there is still plenty of time to act before the lesions become cancerous. On the other hand, some researchers have reported that up to 50% of women with invasive cervical cancer had false negative tests for hpv prior to the diagnosis of the cancer.