Mapping the Spread of Communicable Disease

Emily Badger’s recent post on The Atlantic Cities blog discusses a new model for mapping the global spread of disease.

While it’s long been understood that communicable diseases spread along transportation routes, with carriers introducing new diseases to the uninfected places they visit, air travel has made this process more dynamic. Rather than a single, concentric pattern characteristic of the time before air travel, the spread of communicable diseases seems more random today, with outbreaks appearing in many cities almost simultaneously and spreading rapidly from many centers at once. Various models, representing different explanations for this, have captured the same patterns for the spread of disease. Northwestern University’s Dirk Brockmann sought to identify why so many different models seemed to explain the same patterns.  In so doing, he has identified a new model that once again relies on the concentric circle patterns of pre-air travel days.

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As people migrate to both new and existing urban centers, new airport hubs will emerge, and new disease migration patterns will emerge, as well.  The ability to quickly identify the origin of a pandemic will be very important to global public health.

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