Cynthia - thank you very much for helping me out with such a brilliant
explanation!  It certainly was mind-bending.  I hope that this helps people
to understand what I was trying to say!

And Valerie, thank you for going back into your notes to check again.  I
realise that there are concerns about false-positive HIV tests in other
contexts, but with regard to an infant being deemed to be HIV-free at birth
and subsequently being deemed to have been infected through breastfeeding,
I think we are more or less on the same page :)

Pamela

Cynthia wrote:
So a 50% false-positive rate only means that, *of tests results that were
positive*, 50% of the results correctly identified the existence of the
condition and 50% of the results indicated the condition existed when it
did not. A 50% false-positive rate doesn't tell us anything about what
proportion of negative test results are correct and what proportion are not
correct.
With my eyes glazing over trying to type this post without any errors,

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