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Statistics of infections with diversity in the pathogenicity.

Guinea F, Jansen VA, Stollenwerk N

Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, CSIC, Cantoblanco, E-28049 Madrid, Spain. paco.guinea@icmm.csic.es

The statistics of outbreaks in a model for the propagation of meningococcal disease is analyzed, taking into account the possibility that the population is fragmented into weakly connected patches. It is shown that, depending on the size of the sample studied, the ration between the variance and the average of infected cases can vary from unity (Poisson statistics) to epsilon(-1), where epsilon is the normalized infection rate.

Published 8 March 2005 in Biophys Chem, 115(2): 181-5.
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