Incubation time for AIDS from French transfusion-associated cases.

Although incubation time is a key parameter of the epidemiology of AIDS, statistical estimates based on transfusion-associated AIDS cases have, up to now, used only the single dataset provided by the AIDS program of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. Using a new dataset provided by the Direction Générale de la Santé (DGS), of the French Ministry of Health1, we estimate the mean incubation time for AIDS (median in brackets) to be 5.3 years (5.3 years) with a 90% confidence interval ranging from 4.4 to 8.9 years (4.4 to 8.8 years), when a Weibull distribution is postulated for incubation time. The previously encountered problem of very large confidence intervals (range larger than 100 years), is not observed, indicating that an accurate estimate for mean incubation time will be obtainable in the near future.