Disease Spreading

Many infectious diseases of humans spread either through human-to-human or

human-to-animal interactions; hence, epidemiological models of infection seem

like an obvious area of application for the science of networks, and for social

networks in particular. It may come as a surprise, therefore, that the literature

on mathematical epidemiology has paid relatively little attention to the struc-

ture of the networks—whether sexual, friendship, community, or transportation

networks—through which infectious diseases manifestly spread. Whereas clini-

cal epidemiologists routinely apply methods like contact tracing that are inher-

ently network-oriented (Klovdahl et al. 1994, Potterat et al. 1999), mathematical