[HIV antibodies in a hospital emergency unit. Detection through a system of pooled batches]

In order to determine the frequency of HIV seropositivity of sera from patients attending our hospital emergency department (ED) we used a HIV screening system based on the use of pooled sera. To determine the reliability of this marker we collect all ED serum samples during two different intervals of a week. From 577 sera analyzed by this method we detected 1.38% of HIV positive samples (95% confidence interval from 0.43% to 2.33%) with 74% benefit on reactives. We did not find significative differences between the rates of HIV seropositivity in the two period of analyzing (1.6% in October 1990 vs 1.2% in February 1991). The consistency of this method for anonymous HIV testing could be applied to a large number of samples from cohorts of expected low HIV prevalence rates and indirectly using this marker to control the spreading of HIV in a given population.