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Michael F. Roizen, MD; Joseph Foss, MD; Srinivas Mantha, MD
University of Chicago Chicago, Ill

JAMA. 1994;272(6):434.

	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.

—Although we found the article by Dr Phillips and colleagues¹ interesting, we have several questions regarding their assumptions. First of all, were the correct costs for false-positive testing included? If one assumes the sensitivity and specificity of the tests cited in the article (99% and 99.9% for two of three enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay tests and a Western blot for confirmation), for every 100 000 surgeons tested (assuming a prevalence of 0.06%; data cited in the article), 59.4 true positives and 99 false positives would be detected. Thus, two thirds of the surgeons detected by even this careful scheme of testing would not have human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. Alternatively, if a prevalence rate of 0.4% is assumed, 396 surgeons would be true positives and 99.6 surgeons (20% of the surgeons tested positive) would be false positives.

Our analysis indicates that this article may have underestimated the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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