Definition of "infectivity" [infectivity]

• The ability of a pathogen to establish an infection (noun)

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• "Prion infectivity is extremely resistant to degradation, resulting in an environmental persistence of infectious agent."
• "It crystallizes uniformly from solutions such that the specific infectivity is not altered by recrystallization, not even under conditions of extremely fractionated recrystallization."
• "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."