Strategic public health interventions

Abstract

In the discussion concerning network interactions above I gave several example of how to use network theory to intervene against the spread of infectious diseases. In general a policy maker would like to lengthen the characteristic path length in the network. In doing so she may intervene by vaccinating individuals with high degree or high betweenness centrality measures. In doing so it makes the structure of the interaction network less able to efficiently spread an infectious disease. There have been many studies that have looked at these types of strategies in real world populations. For instance, I, along with Philip Polgreen and Alberto Segre, look at how allocating a limited amount of vaccine by giving it first to the individuals with highest degree in the network, as opposed to randomly, greatly limits the spread of infectious disease in a hospital. Others use social interaction data to investigate how different vaccination programs change the expected size of epidemics.