Friday, November 18, 2005

Nature: Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence

New paper here by Lloyd-Smith et al. on the effect of individual variation in infectiousness. I haven't read it yet, but by the abstract it looks very interesting.

From the editor's summary:

From Typhoid Mary to SARS, it has long been known that some people spread disease more than others. But for diseases transmitted via casual contact, contagiousness arises from a plethora of social and physiological factors, so epidemiologists have tended to rely on population averages to assess a disease's potential to spread. A new analysis of outbreak data shows that individual differences in infectiousness exert powerful influences on the epidemiology of ten deadly diseases.

Damien

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