Superspreading and the Effect of Individual Variation on Disease Emergence

Lloyd-Smith, J. O., Schreiber, S. J., Kopp, P. E., & Getz, W. M. (2005). Superspreading and the Effect of Individual Variation on Disease Emergence. Nature, 438(7066), 355-359.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2005

Volume

438

Issue

7066

Pages

355-359

DOI

10.1038/nature04153

DOI registrant

Springer Nature

Link

https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04153

Cited from

military_strategic_studies

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Concentration
  • In epidemiology, transmission concentrates: superspreading events and overdispersed transmission mean a small fraction of cases drive most infections

    This sourceShows transmission is overdispersed — a small fraction of cases drive most infections (superspreading) — so the epidemic's force concentrates at a few decisive points, with control implications for targeted measures.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Lloyd-Smith and colleagues measure individual infectiousness across ten outbreak or surveillance datasets and plot the "Proportion of transmission expected from the most infectious 20% of cases" against a 20/80 reference curve, finding distributions that are highly overdispersed. In Singapore most SARS cases were barely infectious while a small proportion were highly infectious. That concentration of transmission in a few cases is what the sentence asserts. The work does not reduce the pattern to a single universal fraction or cover every transmission setting, so the sentence's general phrasing is broader than any one estimate it gives.

    “the great majority of SARS cases in Singapore were barely infectious (73% had ν < 1) but a small proportion were highly infectious (6% had ν > 8)”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Mechanisms

• Weighted Network Propagation Model
  • It naturally captures superspreading: because transmission is heterogeneous, a small number of high-weight connectors drive a disproportionate share of the cascade, so targeting them beats treating all nodes alike.

Verification

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