Beyond Simple Pooling for HIV Screening

摘要

We discuss some theoretical features underlying the successful uses of pooling in testing HIV seroprevalence. In particular it is shown that there is a scaling relation for the distribution of positive sera among the pools. A multi-stage pooling method consisting of repeatedly halving the positive pools is proposed. Concentrating on the number of tests required for screening all positive individuals the method is shown to be highly efficient in low prevalence situations.