
Monday February 07, 2005
[ Society ]
Global Spread of Epidemics
I'm going back and forth this morning between my desk and my bed, trying to get over an illness that I seem to be carrying from my last trip to Europe. Disease and illness are constant reminders of our frailties.
I also wonder how modern global transportation networks can affect spread of epidemics from one location to the whole globe.
In a recent paper by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and France's INSERM, titled "The geographic spread of influenza," we read:
This analysis indicates that diffusion over long distances, possibly due to global transportation systems, is so quick that homogeneous global mixing occurs before the epidemic builds up within infected patches.
In other words, before we get a good warning signal, the epidemic has spread everywhere.
Epidemics,
Transportation
2005-02-07 12:15:16.0 --
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Posted by GerwingR on February 08, 2005 at 09:53 PM PST #