Welcome to the HIV forum.
There are numerous reasons why you should not be at all concerned about catching HIV in this situation. First, your assumption ("I am presuming she has HIV") is wrong. Statistically the chance such a woman has HIV is probably under 1 chance in 1,000 -- maybe higher if she is African American , an injection drug user, etc, but still low. Heterosexually transmitted HIV remains more rare in the US than you might assume from media reports. Second, HIV has never been known to be transmitted by kissing. Your assumption is correct that periodontal disease and/or oral ulcers might, in theory, raise the risk -- but probably not much; and given how common such problems are, there must have been billions of kissing events with HIV infected partners in the presence of these conditions, and still no known transmission by ksssing. Third, and similarly, fingering or hand-genital contact has never been known to transmit HIV, even with cuts on the fingers. Unless a cut is fairly deep and actively bleeding, there probably is no significant increased risk.
From a risk assessment perspective, you don't need to be tested for HIV on account of this event. But of course you are free to do that if my reassurance doesn't calm your fears and you would like the additional reassurance of knowing you have had a negative test result. If so, have a standard HIV antibody test about 6 weeks after the event, or a duo ("combo") test for both HIV antibody and p24 antigent at 4 weeks. I recommend against the higher expense of a PCR test. But if you insist on it, and want to spend a couple hundred dollars unnecessarily, you could do that at 10 days or so.
Really, you're overreacting to a non-risk event. Don't worry about it.
Regards-- HHH, MD
Thank you again for the wonderful service you provide for idiots like me who put themselves in these situations.
You're welcome. Agencies like CDC have legal and cultural reasons to be hyper-cautious, and it is true that they don't sufficiently distinguish between real risks and unlikely or theoretical ones. However, One case report almost 3 decades ago, among the billions of HIV exposures and millions of infections since then, certainly should not be "haunting". That there is only one reported case should be highly reassuring. How many people have been killed by lightning since then? Those occurrences probably don't make you worried it could happen to you, right? And yet the odds of getting struck by lightning probably are far higher than the chance you caught HIV in these circumstances.
Thank you for your advice. I wish the CDC was as forthcoming about French/deep kissing and gingivitis as you are. The one case report 26 years ago remains haunting.
Sorry, the sequence is a bit off. I also had a cut on my ring finger which happened about 10 hrs before. Am worried about contact with vaginal fluid.