Table 1.

Common uses of the incubation period distribution of infectious diseases

Major field of use	Explanation and example	Ref.
Clinical practice	Rough estimates of the time of exposure of bedside cases (e.g., to determine the causes and/or sources of infection)	5
	Development of a treatment strategy that extends the incubation period (e.g., antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS)	1
	Early projection of disease prognosis when the incubation period is clearly associated with clinical severity (e.g., diseases caused by exotoxin)	6, 7
	Clinical investigations of the impact of infecting dose on the clinical appearance of a disease (i.e., the dose-response mechanism)	8, 9
Public health practice	Determination of the length of quarantine required for a potentially exposed individual (e.g., limiting the movement of those exposed to SARS within a household)	10
Epidemiologic study	Determination of the eradicability of a disease (e.g., determination of the effectiveness of isolation measures)	11
	Estimation of the time of exposure during a point source outbreak (e.g., in identification of the source of infection during large-scale food poisoning)	12
	Determination of the end of a point source outbreak (i.e., statistical tests that determine if case onset is over)	13
	Reconstruction of epidemic curves and short-term predictions of slowly progressing diseases (e.g., backcalculation of HIV/AIDS and prion diseases)	14–23
	Estimation of the transmission potential and infectiousness relative to disease-age (e.g., estimation of the relative infectiousness of smallpox)	24,25
Ecological study	Determination of the adaptation strategy of a parasite (e.g., evolution of vivax malaria owing to seasonal selection pressure)	26,27