The researchers outfitted each teacher, student and staff member at an American high school with credit card-sized gadgets that transmitted and received radio signals every 20 seconds during one day.
In order to better understand exactly how infectious diseases spread through real-life social networks, a group of Stanford researchers used wireless sensors to track everyone in one American high school during one day of last January's swine flu outbreak. BY ADAM GORLICK Flu season is here. And with every social interaction comes a game of chance: Does the person you're talking to, shaking hands with or kissing have a bug? And if they do, what are the odds you'll catch it? Doctors and public health experts try to make mingling with the sick safer. They develop vaccines, promote the need for frequent handwashing and enforce other common-sense measures to keep coughs, sniffles and sneezes from spreading. But in order to follow and better understand how infectious diseases spread through real-life social networks, a group of Stanford researchers used wireless sensors to track high school students, teachers and staff members throughout one day during the height of last January's swine flu outbreak. "Do you know how many contacts you have with infectious people on a daily basis? Do you know how many contacts you have with anybody on a daily basis?" said James Holland Jones , an associate professor of anthropology and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. "Very often, those are the things we know the least about because they're the hardest to measure." Epidemiologists have always tried to answer those questions through pen-and-paper surveys, asking individuals to recall who they were in contact with on any given day.
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