Margo Chase-Topping

TL;DR: An individual farm–based stochastic model of the current UK epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease reveals the infection dynamics at an unusually high spatiotemporal resolution, and shows that the spatial distribution, size, and species composition of farms all influence the observed pattern and regional variability of outbreaks.

TL;DR: Extrapolation of the discovery curve suggests that there is still a substantial pool of undiscovered human virus species, although an apparent slow-down in the rate of discovery of species from different families may indicate bounds to the potential range of diversity.

TL;DR: Super-shedding has been observed to be associated with colonization at the terminal rectum and might also occur more often with certain pathogen phage types, and epidemiological evidence suggests that super- sheddingding might be important in other bacterial and viral infections.

TL;DR: A greater understanding of the cause of the heterogeneity in bacterial carriage could lead to highly efficient control measures to reduce the prevalence of E. coli O157 in cattle farms in Scotland.

TL;DR: A novel parameter–free method that permits direct estimation of the history of transmission events recoverable from detailed observation of a particular epidemic and develops a bootstrap algorithm that generates percentile intervals for these estimates that shows the procedure to be both precise and robust to possible uncertainties in the historical reconstruction.