The Infectiousness of a Disease Within Households
将感染者传染同家庭易感者的潜力量化为随机变量，提出推断其均值和方差的方法，可检验感染者传染性差异，适用于中等传染性疾病，仅需家庭暴发规模数据，计算简单，并用普通感冒数据说明。
The potential that an infective has for infecting a given susceptible from the same household is quantified as a random variable depending on the duration of the infectious period, the severity of the illness and the mobility of the infective. Procedures for making inference about both the mean value and the variance of this potential are proposed. In particular, the proposed analysis makes it possible to test whether infectives display significant differences in their infectiousness. The methods apply to diseases which are moderately infectious and their implementation requires data on the sizes of outbreaks in a collection of households. The procedures involve only simple computations which are easily done manually. Common cold data are used to illustrate the results.