The latent period of Burkitt's lymphoma: the evidence from epidemiological clustering.

The evidence that the latent period of Burkitt's lymphoma may be short, that is, months rather than years, stems from the observation of seasonal variation in disease onset and time-space clustering. The evidence for both of these effects is equivocal, but both are quite strong in the West Nile district of Uganda, where the disease has been most intensively studied epidemiologically. We have assumed that the interval between some final triggering event and onset of disease follows a log-normal distribution, and we have examined the range of values of the mean and variance of that distribution which are consistent with the observed seasonal variation in incidence. These analyses would suggest that to explain the seasonal variation in the West Nile the latent period must be less than one year on average, and rarely exceed two years.