Viruses and Networks
Link: http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/31/health/marburg-virus-uganda/index.html
This article from CNN was investigating on the Marburg virus outbreak in Uganda, which is spread through bodily fluids, bats, non-human primates, such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys. This outbreak has five cases, two probable, one suspected, and two confirmed. Many health officials are worried about this outbreak because the high mortality rate, the horrible symptoms, and the lack of treatment for this disease. Further, certain cultural practices, such as going into a bat cave for good manure, are potentially putting citizens at risk, and the citizens are already averse to going to the hospital. After the Ebola virus outbreak and the damage the spread of that outbreak caused, it is nice to see the health officials being proactive in stopping a very deadly disease from spreading further. Moreover, similar tactics were used to spread awareness about this disease and prevention techniques, which I hope decreases the amount of people becoming infected through animals.
This story connects to the idea of networks and contagions we covered in class. Since the probability of infection (p) is not that high from person to person as the person would have to come in contact with bodily fluids in order to be infected, the health officials decided to place more efforts in quarantining the patients, which in turn decreased how many people each patient met (k). Quarantining would reduce the basic reproductive number, and hopefully slow and potentially stop the spread of the disease. Further, the article mentioned that this town was fairly rural, which helped the health officials contain the disease, as many of the individuals lived far from each other. Connecting this back to the contact network, this characteristic of the town correlates to a fairly sparse contact network as well. However, these themes only capture the human to human contagion spread and not the animal to human transfer, which could be potentially more dangerous due to the citizen’s connection with nature and bat caves.