Estimating infection prevalence: Best practices and their theoretical underpinnings.

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.