virulence
edyong | July 2, 2009The swine flu pandemic is well under way. With the WHO citing almost 60,000 laboratory-confirmed cases at the time of writing, the race is truly on to understand more about the virus. Now, two new studies have painted a fresh but partly contradictory picture about two of the virus's most important aspects - its infectivity (its ability to spread from host to host) and its virulence (its ability to cause disease in a host). These two traits will largely determine the threat that the virus poses, especially in relation to more familiar garden varieties of seasonal flu.
Both groups, one based…
ddobbs | April 27, 2009I'm guessing most everyone interested in swine flu already reads Effect Measure (as well you should; it was an invaluable resource in my reporting for my Slate piece on the mystery of the virulence of the outbreak in Mexico). But in case you haven't or are not, today's primer there on case fatality rates, virulence, and mortality would make an excellent start.
One of the things we'd like to know about the swine flu virus is its Case Fatality Ratio (CFR, commonly called a case fatality rate, although it isn't technically a rate but a proportion). But what is a CFR? And how is it different…