title: Assessing Measles Transmission in the United States Following a Large Outbreak in California.
abstract: The recent increase in measles cases in California may raise questions regarding the continuing success of measles control. To determine whether the dynamics of measles is qualitatively different in comparison to previous years, we assess whether the 2014-2015 measles outbreak associated with an Anaheim theme park is consistent with subcriticality by calculating maximum-likelihood estimates for the effective reproduction numbe given this year's outbreak, using the Galton-Watson branching process model. We find that the dynamics after the initial transmission event are consistent with prior transmission, but does not exclude the possibilty that the effective reproduction number has increased.
authors.affiliation: St. Mary's Medical Center, San Francisco, California, USA; FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA; Fogarty International Center, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
authors.forename: Seth
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Blumberg
authors.affiliation: FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Worden
authors.affiliation: FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA; Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Wayne
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Enanoria
authors.affiliation: FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA; Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ackley
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Deiner
authors.affiliation: FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Fengchen
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Daozhou
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA; Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lietman
authors.affiliation: FI Proctor Foundation, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA; Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Travis
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Porco
keywords: Measles; effective reproduction number; infectious diseases; transmission chain