title: Statistics of infections with diversity in the pathogenicity.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, CSIC, Cantoblanco, E-28049 Madrid, Spain. paco.guinea@icmm.csic.es
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Guinea
authors.forename: Vincent A A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Jansen
authors.forename: Nico
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Stollenwerk
mesh_terms: D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008585:Meningitis, Meningococcal / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000382:microbiology*; D011336:Probability; D018401:Sample Size