Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

herd immunity: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaningimmunitycompare the meanings
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herdimmunity1 CONSTRUCTHerd immunityTOPLEY & WILSON · HERD

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Epidemiology

Indirect protection of the susceptible when enough of a population is immune

Topley and Wilson coined the phrase in 1923 in The spread of bacterial infection: The problem of herd-immunity, reporting mouse-colony experiments in which the resistance of the group as a whole, rather than of any single animal, governed how far an infection spread. Fine's 1993 review Herd immunity: History, theory, practice set out the modern account: when a sufficient proportion of a population is immune, whether through prior infection or vaccination, each infectious case on average passes the pathogen to fewer than one new person, so chains of transmission tend to die out and even people who are not themselves immune are indirectly protected. The proportion at which this tipping point is reached is called the herd immunity threshold, which rises as a pathogen becomes more transmissible. The construct is distinctive because it operates at the level of the population, not the individual: it names an emergent protective effect that no single immune person possesses on their own, and it is the quantitative basis on which vaccination coverage targets and elimination goals are set. As a separate cross-reference, the word "herd" here carries no judgement of people and is a term of art from animal-population studies; the alternative phrase "community immunity" describes the same construct.[1][2][3]

Unit
A population-level protective effect, expressed as the fraction of the population that is immune relative to the herd immunity threshold
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Estimated from the immune fraction of a population (via serological surveys or vaccination-coverage records) compared against a threshold derived from the pathogen's basic reproduction number, and inferred from declining incidence among unvaccinated groups

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Nearby constructs

immunity3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructscontagion5 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, five constructsbasis3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructs

References

  1. Topley, W. W. C., & Wilson, G. S. (1923). The spread of bacterial infection: The problem of herd-immunity. Journal of Hygiene, 21(3), 243–249. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022172400031478
  2. Fine, P. E. M. (1993). Herd immunity: History, theory, practice. Epidemiologic Reviews, 15(2), 265–302. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.epirev.a036121
  3. Fine, P., Eames, K., & Heymann, D. L. (2011). "Herd immunity": A rough guide. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 52(7), 911–916. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/cir007

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