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Social Networks and Disease Prevalence

The typical idea regards social networks as conduits of disease transmission and disease risk factors, especially at individual level, i.e. who-transmits-to-who. However, this article presents social connectedness also reduce the chronic disease and potentially infectious diseases. The authors showed stronger social ties in remote communities, may inhibit the prevalence of self-reported diarrheal disease and fever, because the network density is predictive of increased water sanitation quality and, consequently, decreased infectious disease risk with the social cohesion and investment in these communities.

The paper analyzed the village-level characteristics and emphasized the influence of “community cohesion”. Though village remoteness and social networks do not directly affect disease but instead act through more immediate factors, e.g, sanitation, water source, household hygiene. More remote villages experience decreased risk not only because of a lower rate of contact with individuals from outside but also because the average individual in them has more relationship in the village passing time network and lives in a larger household than does a comparable person in a less remove village. This means people live in remote place maintain stronger ties within their local community than with people who live in a more urban region, which makes remote people being infected less likely. So the authors concluded how social relationships impacts disease transmission based on the strength of social ties. This helps us to find the method to prevent disease other malevolent stuff spread.

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Source: http://andrewgelman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/American-Journal-of-Public-Health-2012-Zelner.pdf

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