INTRODUCTION Three key epidemiological host traits affect infectious disease spread: susceptibility (propensity to acquire infection), infectivity (propensity to transmit infection to others, once infected) and recoverability (propensity to recover quickly). SIRE is a desktop application for estimating factors affecting these three traits. GETTING STARTED Please read the manual for details of the software. Depending on your platform, the following instructions explain how SIRE can be run: 1) Windows – Download the file “SIRE_v1.0_windows.zip” and unzip. SIRE is run by clicking on the “SIRE.exe” icon. 2) Linux – Download the file “SIRE_v1.0_linux.tar.gz”. This can then be extracted by using the terminal command “tar -zxvf SIRE_v1.0_linux.tar.gz”. The code is executed using “./SIRE”. 3) Macintosh – Download the file “SIRE_v1.0_Mac.zip”. SIRE is run by clicking on the “SIRE.app” icon. If the error message “SIRE can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer…” appears, right clicking on “SIRE.app” and selecting “Open” will allow the option to run.