Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 Fecal blood exam can detect colon cancer, but also produces significant false positives; recommended yearly exams from age 50 to 75 would produce false positives in half of all patients. Various benign conditions of the prostate also produce false PSA positives, leading to considerable anxiety. The best designed studies, which combine digital examination and PSA, show that routine testing leads to needle biopsies on about 18% of the screened population.
False positives are not only a frequent result, but also an expensive one as well. |
| Office sphygmomanometry (the blood pressure cuff) also produces false positives. One study found that 21% of those diagnosed as mildly hypertensive based on an office test had no evidence of hypertension when twenty-four-hour home recordings were obtained.29 These false findings are called white coat positives, meaning that the presumed stress of the test itself produces the increased blood pressure.30
Cancer screening is also replete with false positives. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 For allergen identification, we are more concerned with false negatives than false positives. Thus we ask the authority to review the bioinformatics data using the parameters set by FAO/WHO. The applicant has provided three references in defense of this claim, all produced by the applicant and Novartis, another GMO producer. However, six contiguous amino acids is the standard for the research on protein epitopes. If too many false positives are found, it is possible to apply "filters" (as explained in Kleter and Peijnenburg)201 that will distinguish between false and true positives. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Even today, the male-dominated breast cancer industry is a for-profit system that preys upon women through harmful mammograms that actually cause cancer and produce shockingly high rates of false positives. As I've stated in previous articles here on NewsTarget, mammography harms 10 women for every 1 that it helps. Conventional breast cancer treatment is largely a medical hoax where men use fear to control women by corralling them into treatments where they can poison them with chemotherapy or slice off their breasts. (Sound insane? It is. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Given the fact that HIV tests produce far more false positives than correct positives, there may actually be very few HIV infected Americans. Of these, regardless of whether they are true positives or not, less than 1/3 had been diagnosed with AIDS by the year 1993 and 121,000 of them were still alive. Over two thirds of the HIV infected Americans have not developed any AIDS symptoms since 1985, and the already huge gap is widening each year. |
| These figures may still be exaggerated, as the old HIV tests which were far less accurate and produced even more false positives than the extremely unreliable ELISA and WESTERN BLOT tests, were applied to millions of people worldwide.
Developing countries may have such low AIDS rates because they do not have such extraordinary health risks as the ones found among very active homosexuals, intravenous drug addicts, and hemophiliacs. |
| Another problem is that gay men, drug users, and hemophiliacs who are exposed to semen, drugs, blood transfusions, hepatitis, the Epstein Barr virus, and many other diseases or factors known to cause biological false positives in HIV tests, represent the most unreliable groups in society to demonstrate real presence of HIV.
As prophesied 13 years ago, AIDS has invaded the heterosexual community, or so it appears. Since cervical cancer and other female diseases have more recently been renamed AIDS diseases, AIDS seems to have affected the female population. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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| For cancer screening, false positives not only cause considerable anxiety, but also generate possible risk from follow-up intervention. Only for cervical cancer is screening effective.
The Task Force gives only a few grades of "A" for screening that is routine. In some of those cases, testing often can be and is done in settings other than physician's offices by qualified persons with much less training than medical doctors. |
| Indeed a 2003 study published in JAMA found double the false positives in the United States compared with Great Britain, a finding attributed to inferior mammogram training and fear of malpractice suits. "Very clear and specific standards and targets need to be set for interpretation of mammography," said the study's lead author. "Radiologists who perform outside acceptable ranges need to be told: 'that's not acceptable.'"37
We are not saying that a substantial proportion of physicians are incompetent. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The rate of false positives is shockingly high, and mammography has been scientifically proven to harm 10 women for every one woman that it helps.)
If you undergo such barbaric procedures, note that using aloe vera (both internally and externally) can greatly improve your results by protecting you from the treatment itself. Of course, modern oncologists are simultaneously so arrogant and ignorant that they will insist you take nothing that might "interfere" with their poisons, which is why people who foolishly believe in modern oncology are rapidly removing themselves from the human gene pool. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 Ordering lots of 3-D scans for patients who are at minimal risk for heart disease is going to lead to lots of false positives, just as whole-body CT scans detect numerous incidentalomas. And like harmless incidentalomas that nonetheless must be worked up, harmless imperfections in coronary arteries discovered by 3-D scanners will lead to more cardiac workups, including unnecessary catheterizations, in order to confirm the diagnosis.
The issues surrounding imaging tests once again highlight one of the most pervasive problems in American medicine: the lack of a true market. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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| If too many false positives are found, it is possible to apply "filters" (as explained in Kleter and Peijnenburg)201 that will distinguish between false and true positives. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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| We know that the test is replete with false positives, which cause real stress and suffering, and may lead to further diagnostics with the same result. All this, we should add, comes with significant private and public expense. The American Cancer Society's recommendation— yearly digital exam and fecal blood screening, and signoidoscopy every three years after age fifty—would cost $1 billion annually. The 1996 Task Force estimated the cost-effectiveness of screening at about $30,000 per year of life saved. |
Dr. Jonathan Prousky, BPHE, BSc, ND, FRSH
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 Evolution might favor those who have anxiety, for it makes sense to have a built-in system that ensures survivals Better to have a system that gives more false positives then false negatives. The advantage might be survival, but at a tremendous cost if the sufferer faces a lifetime of discomfort. Thus, it might be said that evolution favors anxious genes.
Incidence
Most patients with anxiety disorders seek help from a primary care physician rather than a psychiatrist.4 In a recent survey of 2,316 randomly selected patients (age 18 years and older) seen by general practitioners, 42. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Because the first thing that will happen if you start testing the entire adult population for AIDS is you will get a lot of false positives.
In fact, there are an increasing number of doctors who say that AIDS isn't even caused by HIV. There's a great book on this subject by Dr. Gary Null called "AIDS: A second opinion," where Dr. Null says that AIDS is really just an immuno-suppressed state. There's no hard, scientific diagnosis for AIDS in the medical community: a doctor can assemble a list of symptoms related to poor immune system function and call that AIDS. |
| With that said, consider how crazy this whole AIDS testing proposal is: conventional doctors want to violate your body by forcing you to take a test for a disease that's largely fictional, which will undoubtedly produce false positives, which will earn you the label of "diseased," which will practically force you into a regime of high-cost AIDS drugs, which will enrich the pharmaceutical companies and, meanwhile, transfer even more power to doctors who could then DEMAND that you submit to all sorts of additional tests.
That's the kind of power some U.S. |
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
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 It received over forty complaints of false positives, including multiple complaints of unnecessary chemotherapy and surgery before Jennifer Rufer's first treatment in April 1998. Industry standards require manufacturers to warn about their experience of problems with a product. Abbott's insert completely omitted mention of reports of false positives resulting in unnecessary treatment." A jury awarded the Rufers $16.2 million in damages. |
| Abbott denied all responsibility, even though the literature distributed with its tests made no mention of the potential for false positives. What's more, according to a court opinion, it turned out that "Abbott also had access to reports that false positive results on its assay led to unnecessary cancer treatment before 1998. It received over forty complaints of false positives, including multiple complaints of unnecessary chemotherapy and surgery before Jennifer Rufer's first treatment in April 1998. |
| The more than forty tests suggesting that she either was pregnant or had cancer were, in fact, all false positives. She was neither pregnant nor had cancer.
Rufer and her husband sued Abbott Laboratories, UWMC, and the cancer specialist who treated her. UWMC and the doctor argued that they had relied on the Abbott test results. Abbott denied all responsibility, even though the literature distributed with its tests made no mention of the potential for false positives. |
Kelly Patricia O'Meara
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 What we found was that the TeenScreen approach misses hardly anybody, but it does identify a whole bunch of kids who aren't really suicidal, so you get a lot of false positives. And that means if you're running a large program at a school, you're going to cripple the program because you're going to have too many kids you have to do something about."19
Okay, let's recap. TeenScreen is so comprehensive that "it misses hardly anybody," but it also identifies "a whole bunch of kids who aren't suicidal?" What Shaffer is saying is that the psych tests do not provide accurate diagnoses'. |
Jacky Law
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 With accuracy, reliability and effectiveness in question, one has to wonder about false positives — how many children will be unnecessarily treated, over-treated, and how many will be harmed?' asked Laura Newman in the BMJ.22
Other critics have mentioned that other methods of treating mental health are effectively sidelined because public money is spent almost exclusively on drugs. Moreover, with mental illness being so highly subjective, all sorts of civil liberty issues present themselves. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| So to me, this whole idea of testing the entire nation for AIDS is utterly ridiculous, because you're going to get a whole lot of false positives. And besides, there are far more important things to be testing for.
Why don't we test people in this country for nutritional deficiencies? That would do a lot more good than testing people for AIDS; we have well over half the population now suffering from chronic vitamin D deficiencies, and that number is even higher in those with dark skin pigmentation because of its UV blocking effect. Why don't we test people for that? |
Martin L. Cross
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 Another problem in reading mammograms is the large number of "false positives" diagnosed by radiologists— cases in which doctors suspect a cancer that is not there.
A report from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care in Boston showed that such "false positives" are most common in women under fifty, and that a woman who has been taking an annual exam since age forty has a 50-50 chance of being incorrectly diagnosed for cancer over a ten-year period—plus a one in five chance of undergoing an unnecessary breast biopsy. |
Tanya Harter Pierce
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 And it turned out that the 5 percent assumed to be inaccurate test results were always false positives, as opposed to false negatives. In other words, the 5 percent supposedly inaccurate test results were only with people who didn't appear to have cancer, but after time went by, hindsight revealed that many of those people did in fact later develop cancer. Thus, the CGH test accuracy was very probably much better than 95 percent, and the test could detect cancer even before the disease was otherwise diagnosable. |
Larry Trivieri, Jr.
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 According to The Lancet, of the 5% of mammograms that suggest further testing, up to 93% are false positives. The Lancet report further noted that because the great majority of positive screenings are false positives, these inaccurate results lead to many unnecessary biopsies and other invasive surgical procedures.70 In fact, 70% to 80% of all positive mammograms do not, on biopsy, show any presence of cancer.71 According to some estimates, 90% of these "callbacks" result from unclear readings due to dense overlying breast tissue. |
John Robbins
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 As of 1994, 1,200 people had taken the test, and there had been no false positives, no times that the test said cancer was present when it actually wasn't. Mammograms, on the other hand, are notorious for high rates of false positives, leading to a tremendous amount of anxiety and unnecessary medical intervention.
When Springer's beloved wife Heather was pronounced "terminal" with breast cancer, he developed a treatment program for her that enabled her to live six additional years. |
Peter Pringle
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 In a letter to Nature, researchers from the Berkeley plant department charged that Quist and Chapela's claim was "unfounded" because they had wrongly interpreted their analysis, probably by looking at false positives from lab contamination.16 Another letter, from a group of researchers at the University of Washington including Matthew Metz, formerly of Berkeley, said, "The discovery of transgenes fragmenting and promiscuously scattering throughout genomes would be unprecedented and is not supported by [the] data. |
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
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| Abbott's insert completely omitted mention of reports of false positives resulting in unnecessary treatment." A jury awarded the Rufers $16.2 million in damages.
FAVORS AND FRAUD
One reason that Washington has resisted all efforts to overhaul health care during the last half century is that key players have their hands in what will soon be a multitrillion-dollar health care till, creating conflicts of interest everywhere. Wherever there is too much money, politicians and businessmen meld like Hollywood's hottest couple of the hour. Label it health care cronyism. |
John Lauritsen
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 ELISA results were false positives; the ELISA test overestimated seropositivity by a factor of almost 150 to 1. Since the German findings elicited cognitive dissonance, in the context of the prevailing AIDS mythology, they were ignored.
Researchers in Venezuela tested blood samples from Amazonian Indians, and found seropositivity rates ranging from 3.3% to 13.3%, though with no reported cases of "AIDS". These findings might be interpreted as meaning: 1) HIV is not the cause of AIDS; 2) AIDS did not originate in Africa; and/or 3) the serological results were false positives. |
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