How Diseases Spread through Communities
21.12.2010 13:58
Branco Weiss fellow Marcel Salathé, a faculty member in the Department of Biology at Penn State University, developed a new technique to count the number of possible disease-spreading events that occur in a typical day.
Using a population of high-school students, teachers, and staff as a model for a closed group of people, Salathé and his team designed a method to count the amount of disease-spreading interactions.
Salathé explained that while schools may indeed be “hot beds” for colds and the flu, individual students do not seem to vary with regard to exposure risk due to their contact patterns.
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