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.

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.