Scientific writing: A reporting guide for Rapid Communications

A Rapid Communication is a timely notification of a change in the nature or spread of an infectious disease. It is a “heads up” 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)