Lillian Bieszke

Undergraduate Research in the Neighborhoods

Norovirus is a highly infectious virus spread through contaminated food and water. It is hard to cultivate in a lab, so researchers have trouble studying it. Luckily, dose-response models can helps study the risk of infection caused by norovirus. Dose-response models help calculate the risk of infection from the amount of ingested pathogens for an individual. Different dose-response models can also look at different characteristics of norovirus, such as aggregation and immunity. Aggregation considers the virus particles to be clumped together in a sample and immunity takes into account the amount of a population that is immune to norovirus. A literature review located dose-response models and they were plotted in R. Three sets of real-world outbreak data were plotted and compared to the different models. Based off of the graphs, the exponential model, exact Atmar beta-Poisson, approximate Atmar beta-Poisson, and approximate Teunis beta-Poisson all appeared to offer a good fit.   

Learn more about this and other research in the STEM Teaching and Learning Facility.