TaylorFitz

Statistics my friend. Statistics. You can test a small portion of the population and if you select it right that sample will be representative of the entire population.

I question the number though. I could see the study being about sexually active black women and not just all black women.

Also I did a quick google search and found this:

http://www.cdc.gov/std/herpes/screening.htm

Basically it means that testing for Herpes can lead to a lot of false positives. The CDC doesn't recommend testing if you show no symptoms since there are so many false positives.

Again I don't know the full details of how they reached that number but there are a lot of ways that the number could be distorted.

Shining_Wizard1979

Incorrectly-applied statistics or bad experimental design, maybe, but to say they "never should be taken seriously," I don't agree with that. Confidence Intervals are utilized, and with proper usage, they can be valuable and efficient tools for analysis. It simply isn't practical to test every single individual in a given population to perform an analysis.

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TaylorFitz

lol You obviously don't understand statistics.