Human networking theory gives picture of infectious disease spread
It's colds and flu season, and as any parent knows, colds and flu spread like wildfire, especially through schools.
New research using human-networking theory may give a clearer picture of just how, exactly, infectious diseases such as the common cold, influenza, whooping cough and SARS can spread through a closed group of people, and even through populations at large.
With the help of 788 volunteers at a high school, Marcel Salathé, a biologist at Penn State University, developed a new technique to count the number of possible disease-spreading events that occur in ...