Social network analysis is now widely used to investigate the dynamics of infectious disease spread from person to person. Vaccination dramatically disrupts the disease transmission process on a contact network, and indeed, sufficiently high vaccination rates can disrupt the process to such an extent that disease transmission on the network is effectively halted. Here, we build on mounting evidence that health behaviors - such as vaccination, and refusal thereof - can spread through social networks through a process of complex contagion that requires social reinforcement. Using network simulations that model both the health behavior and the infectious disease spread, we find that under otherwise identical conditions, the process by which the health behavior spreads has a very strong effect on disease outbreak dynamics. This variability in dynamics results from differences in the topology within susceptible communities that arise during the health behavior spreading process, which in turn depends on the topology of the overall social network. Our findings point to the importance of health behavior spread in predicting and controlling disease outbreaks.
Share ideas that matter on the social web and experience
the benefits of curating the world's best content.
I don't have a Facebook, a Twitter or a LinkedIn account
|
Scooped by FuturICT onto FuturICT Journal Publications |
Are you sure you want to delete this scoop?
 Your new post is loading...
Scoop.it!
When Networks Network By Elizabeth Quill
- When networks depend on other networks, such as a communications network that relies on a power grid, failure can cascade back and forth between the two. This behavior may explain sudden breakdowns in interacting systems. Thus, the effects of an attack on a single node can reduce an übernetwork that starts with 12 operating nodes to just four.-
Once studied solo, systems display surprising behavior when they interact.
Half a dozen times each night, your slumbering body performs a remarkable feat of coordination.
During the deepest throes of sleep, the body’s support systems run on their own timetables. Nerve cells hum along in your brain, their chitchat generating slow waves that signal sleep’s nether stages. Yet, like buses and trains with overlapping routes but unsynchronized schedules, this neural conversation has little to say to your heart, which pumps blood to its own rhythm through the body’s arteries and veins. Air likewise skips into the nostrils and down the windpipe in seemingly random spits and spats. And muscle fluctuations that make the legs twitch come and go as if in a vacuum. Networks of muscles, of brain cells, of airways and lungs, of heart and vessels operate largely independently.
Every couple of hours, though, in as little as 30 seconds, the barriers break down. Suddenly, there’s synchrony. All the disjointed activity of deep sleep starts to connect with its surroundings. Each network — run via the group effort of its own muscular, cellular and molecular players — joins the larger team. Delete the scoop?
Are you sure you want to delete this scoop?
Yes
|
