As well as giving swabs, volunteers also submitted information about how often they clean their belly buttons, whether they have an "innie" or an "outie", as well as their age, sex, ethnicity and where they grew up.
Today, hundreds of workers who earlier this week were given nasal swab tests to determine if they had come in contact with anthrax began taking blood tests as health officials try to determine the extent of the exposure in the American Media building.
Hundreds of people who worked in or visited the building were given nasal swabs to determine whether or not they had been exposed.
All men and boys over age 15 had to report to the posts, where they were questioned, fingerprinted and given mouth swabs for DNA testing, Mr. Awad said.
For field duplicate samples, the children were given two swabs to brush inside their cheeks in immediate succession for 1 minute each.
The model detailed the individual rate of colonization and decolonization by S. pneumoniae for all children attending the schools (even those that gave no swab at all).
Closely related to this was the associated embarrassment of having to give a swab of vaginal secretions (with a potential smell) to a health worker.
With these assumptions, the individual rate to acquire serotype s at time t was β C s (t)/n, where n was the size of the school (including children that gave no swab at all) and β corresponded to pairwise child-to-child transmission rate, irrespective of the size n of the school.
Like all the more than 1,000 employees, relatives and visitors at American Media who had been in the company's headquarters in the last two months, Mr. Arizmandi was recently given a nasal swab, which tested negative for anthrax.
Any given set of swab results can therefore be consistent with many different patterns of transmission.
