# What questions would a statistician ask about analysis of E. coli outbreak?

You may have heard about the recent enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) outbreak in Germany.
I'm thinking of Q+As between reporters / public officials ↔ non-experts, say teachers and engineers with a Diplom / Master's degree but at most a smattering of statistics.

(Is a picture, a map of EHEC land showing various strains of EHEC and the coverage of various tests, possible ?)

Monday 20 June: I thought that the EHEC outbreak would be an area where statistics really matters in the world at large: what's the evidence for various causes, how can these be communicated to the public ? So, starting a bounty.

• I'm not sure if it should be community wiki as I think that votes on good answers should count towards rep, and there's a chance you'll get better answers if such is the case. – Jeromy Anglim Jun 14 '11 at 11:15

If you have no a priori scientific questions you want/need answered - I would look at the spatial distribution of cases. In particular, I would estimate a sort of spatial "intensity" function-- that is some function $f( {\bf s} ) = E({\rm prevalence} | {\rm \ you \ are \ in \ location \ } {\bf s} )$. So that you don't overfit the data, some smoothing would be appropriate, which would effectively "bin" nearby locations together. The simplest approach would be using a kernel density estimation function (e.g. the kde2d function in R, although some pre-processing of the data may be necessary). This would help identify "hot spots" in the spatial distribution and could lead an investigator to identify environmental reservoirs of E. Coli.