Magdalene Walters, a student from the University of Notre Dame, worked with Dr. John Drake to study the age distribution of a measles outbreak.
Abstract: In 1997, São Paulo, Brazil experienced a measles outbreak with an unusually high average age of infection. It has since been hypothesized that this high age of infection was due to unvaccinated rural adults traveling to urban communities.1 This project tested this hypothesis through the use of descriptive statistics and nonparametric analyses of variance. Evidence was found for varying adult transmission patterns between urban and rural communities. Forty-nine counties display a multimodal distribution of age of infection, and the rest were categorized as moderately multimodal or non-multimodal. The average outbreak size was significantly different between the multimodal, moderately multimodal, and non-multimodal counties. Counties which were not multimodal, displayed a high modal age of infection. Small outbreak sizes consistently displayed patterns associated with spread of infection between adults and evidence suggests a correlation between outbreak size and proportion of children infected.