This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

JOEL L. Nitzkin, MD; Mark J. Merkens, MD
Monroe County Department of Health Rochester, NY

JAMA. 1985;253(23):3397-3398.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The article by Weiss et al¹ relative to the screening for human T-cell leukemia (lymphotropic) retrovirus type III (HTLV-III) antibodies in the Jan 11 issue strongly supports the recommendation that all blood donors be screened for evidence of HTLV-III antibody using the currently available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) testing procedure. Unfortunately, neither this article nor the accompanying editorial² addresses the personal health or community health problems likely to be caused by universal implementation of this screening procedure for all blood donations.

If we assume a sensitivity and specificity of the ELISA procedure in the range of 97% to 99%, this means that 1% to 3% of those likely to be harboring the HTLV-III virus are likely to be missed by the test, and 1% to 3% of those who are truly negative would generate a positive test result.

Monroe County, New York, consists of the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?