Pathogenicity

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Pathogenicity is the ability of a pathogen to produce an infectious disease in an organism.

It is often used interchangeably with the term "virulence", although virulence is used more specifically to describe the relative degree of damage done by a pathogen, or the degree of pathogenicity caused by an organism. A pathogen is either pathogenic or not, and is determined by the pathogen's ability to produce toxins, its ability to enter tissue and colonize and its ability to spread from host to host.

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