ABSTRACT
The aim of dose-response models is to estimate the proportion of individuals in a population expected to experience an adverse health effect when exposed to a specific amount of a biological hazard. The biological foundation for dose-response models derives from major steps in the disease process: exposure, infection, illness and consequences. A dose-response model gives the probability of illness according to the number of ingested pathogenic microorganisms. As shown with the rotavirus dataset, it is relatively straightforward to derive a dose-response model from challenge trial studies. Excluding dose levels associated with a low or high probabilities of responses may bias the dose-response model parameter estimates or increase their uncertainty. In microbial quantitative risk assessment, the objective of a dose–response model is to establish a link between the level of biological hazard exposure and the probability of occurrence of an effect.
