%0 Journal Article %T Scientific writing: A reporting guide for Rapid Communications %J Archive of "Canada Communicable Disease Report". %D 2017 %X A Rapid Communication is a timely notification of a change in the nature or spread of an infectious disease. It is a ˇ°heads upˇ± that something new is on the horizon that may have immediate implications. For example, in December 2013, the first local transmission of the mosquito-borne chikungunya virus was confirmed in several Caribbean islands. A month later, clinicians in Canada were advised to consider this possibility in patients presenting with fever and arthralgia who had a positive travel history from one of the affected islands (1). A year later, chikungunya virus had spread throughout the Caribbean and around the world and there was a documented spike in the number of travel-related cases of chikungunya virus in Canada (2). Soon after, a similar pattern of expansion occurred with Zika virus (3) %U https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764721/