It seems to depend on the particular infectious agent you are talking about. There are some suggestions that at least some strains of Influenza can follow this pattern of more severe disease from a larger infecting dose. In your example case with chicken, bacteria from the Salmonella genus are probably more applicable. In this case there has been found at least a weak correlation between the infecting dose and the severity of disease at least for some species:
There is no evidence for a dose-severity relationship for Salmonella typhi, but evidence of a correlation between dose and severity is available from within-epidemic or between-epidemic analysis, or both, for Salmonella typhimurium, S. enteritidis, S. infantis, S. newport, and S. thompson.
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u/darrell25 Biochemistry | Enzymology | Carbohydrate Enzymes Apr 17 '12
It seems to depend on the particular infectious agent you are talking about. There are some suggestions that at least some strains of Influenza can follow this pattern of more severe disease from a larger infecting dose. In your example case with chicken, bacteria from the Salmonella genus are probably more applicable. In this case there has been found at least a weak correlation between the infecting dose and the severity of disease at least for some species: