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John F. Bridgeman, MD
Mission Viejo, Calif

JAMA. 1988;259(7):1012.

	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 recent article by Cleary et al¹ examining compulsory premarital screening for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) seems to have been constructed with a negative bias toward premarital screening.

It is unfortunate that we still lack adequate public health data on the prevalence of HIV infection in the population. This study chose to use the incidence of infection among blood donors who, as the authors mentioned, are self-selecting for decreased HIV infectivity. Perhaps a better but still inadequate population base would have been the armed forces data (men, 1.5 HIV positive per 1000 men; women, approximately 0.9 HIV positive per 1000 women). Using this base would have projected a greatly increased number of positive individuals being screened by premarital testing.

This study chose the lowest sensitivity factor of 98.3 for the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay; this sensitivity factor was critical for the final conclusion. The other tests . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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