Using network theory to identify infectious disease outbreaks
1,638 views · Published 21 March 2013 · 10:11 · Indexed 31 October 2026
Channel: The Royal Society · 2013 · Science & Technology
Regions with poor health infrastructure often lack the resources to identify outbreaks of infectious diseases correctly. This limits the deployment of appropriate response and treatment. In an Interface paper, the authors present a novel strategy to evaluate disease outbreaks based on similarities in symptoms and other easily collected characteristics that can be rapidly reported with the most basic surveillance systems. In this podcast, Ruth Milne talks to one of the authors, Sebastian Funk about how they have used network theory to show that disease agents can be grouped into distinct clusters, permitting probabilistic assignments of diseases to outbreaks and how the model was applied to the case study of disease outbreaks in South Asia with the common symptom of encephalitis. Video cover image by Jensflorian via CC-BY-SA-3.0.
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