The Nation - News from Oct. 12, 1988

The most frequently used screening test for AIDS virus infections has proved extremely accurate in testing applicants for military service, government researchers have found. Researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington studied the frequency of “false positive” results when 135,187 military applicants were screened between Oct. 16, 1985, and June 30, 1987. Only one of the 15 applicants who tested positively for the AIDS virus was found to be actually negative when the sample was retested with another confirmatory test, the researchers said in a paper to be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. That indicates the test was 99.9993% accurate, they reported.