3 October 2020
A superspreader is a person infected with a disease who is especially contagious, passing the infection on to an unusually large number of people. For many, the term may be a new one, but it has existed for nearly fifty years in public health jargon.
The first known use of superspreader is in the context of influenza and appears in the September 1973 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases:
Other possible studies would explore the effect of the closing of schools (duration and timing), interference by competing viruses, and variable rather than uniform infectiousness; one idea that would merit special attention is the occasional "superspreader": how frequently he occurs, how infectious he is, and how he is characterized (genetics, age, overt or silent infection, etc.)
As time went on, the meaning of the term expanded to encompass events at which a large number of are infected, termed superspreader events. This term’s first use appears in the context of the 2003 SARS outbreak. From the journal Science of 12 March 2004:
On the basis of epidemiological investigations, we divided the course of the epidemic into early, middle, and late phases. The early phase is defined as the period from the first emergence of SARS to the first documented superspreader event (SSE).
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The first major SARS outbreak occurred in a hospital, HZS-2, in the city of Guangzhou, beginning on 31 January 2003 where an SSE was identified to be associated with more than 130 primary and secondary infections, of which 106 were hospital-acquired cases.
Sources:
Chinese SARS Molecular Science Consortium. “Molecular Evolution of the SARS Coronavirus During the Course of the SARS Epidemic in China.” Science, 303.5664, 12 March 2004, 1666. JSTOR.
Fox, John P. and Edwin D. Kilbourne. “Epidemiology of Influenza: Summary of Influenza Workshop IV.” Journal of Infectious Diseases, 123.3, September 1973, 362. JSTOR.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2012, s.v. super-, prefix.