Abstract: My talk will be centered around an example of cross-fertilization between medicine and mathematics. Data on the size of outbreaks with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Dutch hospitals were collected to estimate the transmissibility of the two most relevant MRSA strains in the Netherlands. Analysis of these data led to a relation between the epidemiological model for the spread of MRSA in hospitals and queuing theory, and a new estimation method for transmissibility of pathogens in outbreak settings with contact screening. Recently, Amaury Lambert and Pieter Trapman derived an improved estimator if additional data is available. This is joined work with Marjan Wassenberg, Marc Bonten en Pieter Trapman.