Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Tendency or capacity to infect; infectiousness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The ability of a pathogen to establish an infection

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Prion infectivity is extremely resistant to degradation, resulting in an environmental persistence of infectious agent.

    CWD Worse Than Ever In Wisconsin Counties 2009

  • Prion infectivity is extremely resistant to degradation, resulting in an environmental persistence of infectious agent.

    CWD Worse Than Ever In Wisconsin Counties 2009

  • It crystallizes uniformly from solutions such that the specific infectivity is not altered by recrystallization, not even under conditions of extremely fractionated recrystallization.

    Max Delbrück - Nobel Lecture 1972

  • He found that the filamentous forms of some viruses (e.g. those of myxoviruses such as those which cause influenza, mumps, fowl plague, and Newcastle disease) can be ruptured by suspending them in water, and suggested that their infectivity is limited to their tips, so that these filamentous forms can, as later work showed, be regarded as having an infective «warhead» composed of nucleic acid and a long tail composed of non-infective viral haemagglutinin.

    Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet - Biography 1964

  • But the main thing to know is that tooth decay is a bacterial infection and you can spread it from one person to another during the window of infectivity, which is during infancy and especially during the time of tooth eruption.

    11Alive.com | Atlanta Video News 2010

  • They may be harder or easier to catch ("infectivity"); they can cause a milder or more severe illness ("virulence").

    Everything You Need to Know About the Flu 1 Dinosaur 2009

  • They may be harder or easier to catch ("infectivity"); they can cause a milder or more severe illness ("virulence").

    Archive 2009-09-01 1 Dinosaur 2009

  • Unsafe sex -- a vital part of the 'infectivity' leg of the Triad -- swiftly rose.

    Gabriel Rotello: Andrew Sullivan Declares the 'End of AIDS' - Again 2008

  • The purpose of condoms, for example, is to decrease the 'infectivity' leg of HIV's Triad of Risk.

    Gabriel Rotello: Andrew Sullivan Declares the 'End of AIDS' - Again 2008

  • In this war, assassination attacks are now popular because the people never get a chance to see their brutality, illegality, infectivity, and callousness.

    Majid Sharifi: The Myth of the Empire Majid Sharifi 2011

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