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Screening for HIV: Can We Afford the False Positive Rate?
Abstract
We are a testing culture: we test our urine for drugs; we test our sweat for lies. It is not surprising that we should also test our blood for the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). But before we screen low-risk groups for antibody to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), we should consider what the results will mean. Tests for HIV antibody appear to be characterized by extraordinarily low false positive rates. Even so, positive initial and confirmatory tests in someone at low risk of HIV infection are by no means synonymous with infection, because of the possibility of false positive results. . . .
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Citations
Cited by
Screening for the Presence of a Disease by Pooling Sera Samples
Litvak, E., Tu, X. M., & Pagano, M. (1994) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.1080/01621459.1994.10476764 · Cited by 142
Decision-analytic modeling to evaluate benefits and harms of medical tests: uses and limitations
Trikalinos, T. A., Siebert, U., & Lau, J. (2009) · Medical Decision Making · doi:10.1177/0272989x09345022 · Cited by 88
Metadata
- Authors
- Meyer, K. B., & Pauker, S. G.
- Venue
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Publisher
- Massachusetts Medical Society
- Published
- 1987-07-23
- Volume
- 317
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 238-241
- ISSN
- 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-4406
- OpenAlex
- W2025138752
- Cited by
- 194
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 34.63
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Screening for HIV: Can We Afford the False Positive Rate? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1056/nejm198707233170410
- The paper
- Meyer, K. B., & Pauker, S. G. (1987). Screening for HIV: Can We Afford the False Positive Rate? New England Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm198707233170410
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
