Dear Ann Landers,
I took my annual physical exam and was horri-fied when the results came back and I tested positive for HIV. I am a 24-year-old woman who has never had sex with anyone. I returned to my doctor in a state of panic and was retested. The re-sults were negative. It seems the flu shot I had gotten two weeks earlier produced the false positive. Please tell your readers about this again. It scared the living daylights out of me. -Davenport, Iowa

Dear Davenport,
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, it is indeed possible for a flu shot to create falsely reactive test results with the Elisa test. It is always best to get retested. The Western Blot test is more spe-cific and will rule out the false positives.