Estimating infection prevalence: Best practices and their theoretical underpinnings.

ABSTRACT: Accurately estimating infection prevalence is fundamental to the study of population health, disease dynamics, and infection risk factors. Prevalence is estimated as the proportion of infected individuals ("individual-based estimation"), but is also estimated as the proportion of samples in which evidence of infection is detected ("anonymous estimation"). The latter method is often used when researchers lack information on individual host identity, which can occur during noninvasive sampling of wild populations or when the individual that produced a fecal sample is unknown. The goal of this study was to investigate biases in individual-based versus anonymous prevalence estimation theoretically and to test whether mathematically derived predictions are evident in a comparative dataset of ga

SUBMITTER: Miller IF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6053589 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature