Indirect Interactions: Cryptic Connections and the White-Nose Syndrome Epidemic
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-cryptic-disease-transmission-epidemics.html
In this article, researchers studying the spread of white-nose syndrome in bats have found a way to track “cryptic connections,” or indirect interactions between bats in different social groupings. By dusting some of the bats with fluorescent powder (with different colors for different bats), they could see where the powder stuck on surfaces and got on other bats, including bats from different hibernation social groups and bats from different species. Looking at the results of the dust, they were able to solve mysteries of how the disease still decimated populations of bats that hibernated alone rather than in groups and how it spread between bats of different species. The researchers were able to develop a model that better predicted how white-nose syndrome later spread through the bat population they were studying. Their study shows how these cryptic connections are actually much more important in modeling epidemics than was previously thought.
In class, we learned a little bit about epidemics and how networks can help model disease spread. We touched on how the edges in the disease spreading network were contacts and not just people in a social network. The fact that many of the contacts are indirect makes it hard to produce a concrete network structure since a person can’t know for sure how exactly they got sick. It could be from something as unconscious as touching a doorknob that a sick person had touched—a cryptic connection. We have some knowledge of these connections, but it would be worth finding ways to illuminate these cryptic connections whenever we study disease spreads and incorporate them into the networks we use to model epidemics.