Information alone is insufficient to motivate people to prepare. The way in which information is presented or conveyed is an important factor in determining an individual's response. People wanted messages about specific actions that they could take to protect themselves and their families and to mitigate any consequences. They wanted transparent and honest communication where both good and bad news is conveyed. There was a desire across all groups for clear and specific information, such as infection and/or death rates and defining symptoms. This reflects a failure to distinguish between the pandemic and its consequences and highlights the importance of doing so for risk communication. Quantifying Type-Specific Reproduction Numbers for Nosocomial Pathogens: Evidence for Heightened Transmission of an Asian Sequence Type 239 MRSA Clone An important determinant of a pathogen's success is the rate at which it is transmitted from infected to susceptible hosts. Although there are anecdotal reports that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) clones vary in their transmissibility in hospital settings, attempts to quantify such variation are lacking for common subtypes, as are methods for addressing this question using routinely-collected MRSA screening data in endemic settings. Here we present a method to quantify the time-varying transmissibility of different subtypes of common bacterial nosocomial pathogens using routine surveillance data. The method adapts approaches for estimating reproduction numbers based on the probabilistic reconstruction of epidemic trees, but uses relative hazards rather than serial intervals to assign probabilities to different sources for observed transmission events. The method is applied to data collected as part of a retrospective observational study of a concurrent MRSA outbreak in the United Kingdom with dominant endemic MRSA clones (ST22 and ST36) and an Asian ST239 MRSA strain (ST239-TW) in two linked adult intensive care units, and compared with an approach based on a fully parametric transmission model. The results provide support for the hypothesis that the clones responded differently to an infection control measure based on the use of topical antiseptics, which was more effective at reducing transmission of endemic clones. They also suggest that in one of the two ICUs patients colonized or infected with the ST239-TW MRSA clone had consistently higher risks of transmitting MRSA to patients free of MRSA. These findings represent some of the first quantitative evidence of enhanced transmissibility of a pandemic MRSA lineage, and highlight the potential value of tailoring hospital infection control measures to specific pathogen subtypes. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is responsible for a high burden of morbidity and mortality worldwide [1] [2] [3] [4] . While community-associated MRSA is becoming increasingly important globally [5, 6] , in many countries, including the United Kingdom, MRSA remains predominantly a nosocomial pathogen [7, 8] . The dominant sequence type (ST) in Asia is ST239, and recent analysis of whole-genome sequence data has shown that this ST has distinct lineages in Asia, Europe and South America which probably share a European ancestor [9] [10] [11] . Little is known about what has enabled this ST to be so successful, or whether its propensity to transmit between hosts differs from other MRSA types in certain settings. A recent concurrent outbreak due to an ST239 MRSA strain (ST239-TW, subsequently referred to as TW) and the two dominant endemic UK MRSA types (ST22 and ST36, which we refer to as non-TW) in two linked adult intensive care units in a London teaching hospital provided a rare opportunity to compare the transmissibility of different MRSA types in the same clinical setting [12] .