FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 361:112-115 July 9, 2009 Number 2 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text PDF PDA Full Text Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited E-mail When Letters Appear PubMed Citation

The early phases of an epidemic present decision makers with predictable challenges¹ that have been evident as the current novel influenza A (H1N1) virus has spread. The scale of the problem is uncertain when a disease first appears but may increase rapidly. Early action is required, but decisions about action must be made when the threat is only modest — and consequently, they involve a trade-off between the comparatively small, but nearly certain, harm that an intervention may cause (such as rare adverse events from large-scale vaccination or economic and social costs from school dismissals) and the uncertain probability of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

From the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston (M.L.); the Department of Community Medicine, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, and the School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong — both in Hong Kong (S.R.); and the Medical Research Council Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modeling, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London, London (S.C., A.C.G., N.M.F.).

This article (10.1056/NEJMp0904380) was published on May 27, 2009, and was last updated on May 28, 2009, at NEJM.org.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Doshi, P. (2009). Calibrated response to emerging infections. BMJ 339: b3471-b3471 [Full Text]