Contact Network Analysis

Network theory has become an exceptionally useful tool in the transmission and control of infectious diseases. Despite its complexity in the real population, researchers over several decades have developed network models and defined a large variety of measurable properties that can be used to characterize certain key aspects. This has helped its increasing relevance for the improved understanding and control of infectious diseases given the interconnectedness of today¿s world. The relevance lies in the fact that a network describes potential disease transmission paths that can be constructed and modeled to predict the disease spread based on which proactive control strategy can be in place. Network modeling on disease development has been exercised in various complex networks, and results showed diseases spread more easily and cause epidemic in scale-free network compared to regular lattices and random networks due to the heterogeneity in the number of links per node. Various epidemic control strategies have also been compared among network types, and showed that strategies should base the network structure of the population.