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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- | ||
| A New Epidemic Model: Super-Spreaders | ||
| 2014-11-07 | ||
| [MassGenHospital] SARS led to the discovery of "super-spreaders," who can infect dozens of people. They also exist, it appears, in other infectious diseases. When an infectious disease outbreak occurs, public health authorities are keen to determine its R0 value: the reproductive number of the pathogen, or how many people will become infected from contact with one individual. Yet with SARS and other respiratory diseases, it turns out that the R0 value tells only part of the story about a disease's spread. If R0 is less than one - meaning that, on average, most people aren't infecting anyone else - the disease will eventually die out on its own. If R0 is more than one - on average, each case leads to more cases - public health authorities must contend with an epidemic. Beyond the R0 Value Transmission rates were once assumed to approximate a bell curve. However, some super-spreaders can be linked to dozens of cases, while the majority infected few or none. The phenomenon of super-spreading is as important to epidemiologists as the overall R0. Case Study: Beijing SARS Outbreak 2003 A woman entered a Beijing hospital in February 2003 to be treated for complications of diabetes. No one knows of any contact she had with a SARS patient, but the hospital did treat someone with SARS in March. On April 5, the diabetic woman developed a fever, headache and fluid on her lungs. On April 12, the day she died, eight of her relatives were diagnosed with probable SARS. She infected 33 or 74 people who had contact with her in the hospital; the chain of transmission ultimately included 77 SARS cases and 15 deaths. How to Stop the Spread? Does this mean we should be on the hunt for modern-day Typhoid Marys?
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| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #5 I am impressed by how little attention the enterovirus outbreak is getting in the media. Very good message discipline. Usually something that results in dead or paralyzed children would be Big News. Of course, if they start talking about it, people might start drawing conclusions as to how it got started. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2014-11-07 23:26 |
| #4 Those in our government seemed to have a cavalier attitude about ebola and enterovirus EV-D68 that's because the health impacts on ACTUAL American citizens is less important than the Democrat party picking up those amnestied voters from Central America (who also are living on the American Citizens' dime) |
| Posted by: Frank G 2014-11-07 22:34 |
| #3 I highly recommend reading the wiki on Typhoid Mary. The woman refused to believe she carried the fever and spread it from family to family wherever she went. She was a cook who didn't believe in hand washing. |
| Posted by: Anon1 2014-11-07 19:07 |
| #2 Those in our government seemed to have a cavalier attitude about ebola and enterovirus EV-D68. It became evident very quickly not how much was known about these viruses but how little was known. That is why the public was so dismayed about the cases appearing in this country and the lack of federal efforts to control further outbreaks. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2014-11-07 14:17 |
| #1 TW: Interesting article. I wonder if superspreaders might have a mutated form of the disease which makes them more contagious and lethal than the those with the original version of the virus. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2014-11-07 14:11 |