Conditional Dose‐Response Relationships for Microorganisms: Development and Application

1. Only one viable microorganism is required to initiate the infection process in vivo. 2. Individuals ingest a number of microorganisms representing a random sample from a Poisson distribution (with a mean of d). 3. The survival of any microorganism within a single host is independent of the survival of any other microorganism within that host. 4. In the case of the exponential model, the probability of survival of each of the microorganisms in any host is equal to ‘‘r.’’ 5. In the case of the beta-Poisson model, the distribution of microorganism-host survival probabilities is given by a beta distribution with parameters of a and b.