According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the culprit is a sort of coronavirus, the same family as the bug that causes SARS.Having had close calls with both SARS and H5N1, the world is watching and waiting to see if this new virus possesses the combination of infectiousness and lethality that made those two diseases such a worry.
Its infectiousness, however, gives it the potential to make a lot of other animals less productive too, very quickly.
Lots of measures are needed: improving education, encouraging monogamy, delaying the age of first sexual encounter, helping young women to win a greater say over their sex lives and widening access to antiretroviral drugs that lessen sufferers' infectiousness.
Another factor that may amplify the reaction out of all proportion to the comic stimulus is the social infectiousness that laughter shares with other emotive manifestations of group behaviour.
The spread of a disease is facilitated by several factors, including an increased degree of infectiousness of the disease-causing agent, human-to-human transmission of the disease, and modern means of transportation, such as air travel.
Blatter's plight is Shakespearean in intensity and nuclear in its infectiousness.
Biological warfare agents differ greatly in the type of organism or toxin used in a weapons system, lethality, length of incubation, infectiousness, stability, and ability to be treated with current vaccines and medicines.
The intricacies of properly utilizing personal protective equipment, combined with Ebola's infectiousness and inevitable human fallibility, have made this outbreak a clinician's nightmare.
On a scale of infectiousness, these songs are pestilential.
It moved to Broadway the next year, where it was praised by reviewers for its inventive infectiousness, even if it was also charged with a degree of sentimentality and dramatic incoherence.
This wheezy collapse has been captured on record ("Nichols and May at Work"); and anyone who has been in its force field knows the strength of its infectiousness.
