TY - JOUR AU - Gani, Raymond AU - Leach, Steve T1 - Epidemiologic Determinants for Modeling Pneumonic Plague Outbreaks T2 - Emerging Infectious Disease journal PY - 2004 VL - 10 IS - 4 SP - 608 SN - 1080-6059 AB - Pneumonic plague poses a potentially increasing risk to humans in plague nonendemic regions either as a consequence of an aerosolized release or through importation of the disease. Pneumonic plague is person-to-person transmissible. We provide a quantitative assessment of transmissibility based on past outbreaks that shows that the average number of secondary cases per primary case (R0) was 1.3 (variance = 3.1), assuming a geometric probability distribution, prior to outbreak control measures. We also show that the latent and infectious periods can be approximated by using lognormal distributions with means (SD) of 4.3 (1.8) and 2.5 (1.2) days. Based on this parameter estimation, we construct a Markov-chain epidemic model to demonstrate the potential impact of delays in implementing outbreak control measures and increasing numbers of index cases on the incidence of cases in simulated outbreaks. KW - Yersinia pestis KW - pneumonic plague KW - mathematical modeling KW - United States KW - Ecuador KW - China KW - Myanmar KW - Madagascar KW - Zambia DO - 10.3201/eid1004.030509 UR - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/4/03-0509_article ER - End of Reference