Infectivity
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In epidemiology, infectivity refers to the ability of a pathogen to establish an infection. More specifically, infectivity is a pathogen's capacity for horizontal transmission that is, how frequently it spreads among hosts that are not in a parent-child relationship. It is closely related to the concept of incidence, which is the measure of infectivity in a population.
Infectivity has been shown to positively correlate with virulence. This means that as a pathogen's ability to infect a greater number of hosts increases, so does the level of harm it brings to the host.[1]
A pathogen's infectivity is subtly but importantly different from its transmissibility, which refers to a pathogen's capacity to pass from parent to child.
[edit] References
- ^ Stewart, AD; Logsdon, JM; Kelley, SE (April 2005). "An empirical study of the evolution of virulence under both horizontal and vertical transmission". Evolution 59 (4): 730–739. doi:10.1554/03-330. PMID 15926685.
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