Abstract
In epidemiology, contact tracing is a process to control the spread of an infectious disease and identify individuals who were previously exposed to patients with the disease. After the emergence of AIDS, Social Network Analysis (SNA) was demonstrated to be a good supplementary tool for contact tracing. Traditionally, social networks for disease investigations are constructed only with personal contacts. However, for diseases which transmit not only through personal contacts, incorporating geographical contacts into SNA has been demonstrated to reveal potential contacts among patients. In this research, we use Taiwan SARS data to investigate the differences in connectivity between personal and geographical contacts in the construction of social networks for these diseases. According to our results, geographical contacts, which increase the average degree of nodes from 0 to 108.62 and decrease the number of components from 961 to 82, provide much higher connectivity than personal contacts. Therefore, including geographical contacts is important to understand the underlying context of the transmission of these diseases. We further explore the differences in network topology between one-mode networks with only patients and multi-mode networks with patients and geographical locations for disease investigation. We find that including geographical locations as nodes in a social network provides a good way to see the role that those locations play in the disease transmission and reveal potential bridges among those geographical locations and households.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Abernethy, N.F.: Automating Social Network Models for Tuberculosis Contact Investigation. Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford (2005)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Singapore, 2003. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 52, 405–411 (2003)
Chen, Y.C., et al.: SARS in Hospital Emergency Room. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10, 782–788 (2004)
Ghani, A.C., Swinton, J., Garnett, G.P.: The Role of Sexual Partnership Networks in the Epidemiology of Gonorrhea. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 24, 45–56 (1997)
Hsueh, P.R., Yang, P.C.: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Epidemic in Taiwan, 2003. Journal of Microbiology, Immunology and Infection 38, 82–88 (2005)
Klovdahl, A.S.: Social Networks and the Spread of Infectious Diseases: the AIDS Example. Social Science & Medicine 21, 1203–1216 (1985)
Klovdahl, A.S., et al.: Networks and Tuberculosis: an Undetected Community Outbreak Involving Public Places. Social Science & Medicine 52, 681–694 (2001)
Klovdahl, A.S., et al.: Social networks and Infectious Disease: the Colorado Springs Study. Social Science & Medicine 38, 79–88 (1994)
McElroy, P.D., et al.: A Network-Informed Approach to Investigating a Tuberculosis Outbreak: Implications for Enhancing Contact Investigations. The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease 7, S486–S493 (2003)
Meyers, L.A., et al.: Network Theory and SARS: Predicting Outbreak Diversity. Journal of Theoretical Biology 232, 71–81 (2005)
Morris, M.: Epidemiology and Social Networks: Modeling Structured Diffusion. Sociological Methods Research 22, 99–126 (1993)
Peiris, J.S.M., et al.: The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The New England Journal of Medicine 349, 2431–2441 (2003)
Rothenberg, R.B., Narramore, J.: Commentary: the Relevance of Social Network Concepts to Sexually Transmitted Disease Control. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 23, 24–29 (1996)
Rothenberg, R.B., et al.: Social Network Dynamics and HIV Transmission. AIDS 12, 1529–1536 (1998)
Rothenberg, R.B., et al.: Using Social Network and Ethnographic Tools to Evaluate Syphilis Transmission. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 25, 154–160 (1998)
Shen, Z., et al.: Superspreading SARS Events, Beijing, 2003. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10, 256–260 (2004)
Yu, I.T.S., et al.: Evidence of Airborne Transmission of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Virus. The New England Journal of Medicine 350, 1731–1739 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chen, YD., Tseng, C., King, CC., Wu, TS.J., Chen, H. (2007). Incorporating Geographical Contacts into Social Network Analysis for Contact Tracing in Epidemiology: A Study on Taiwan SARS Data. In: Zeng, D., et al. Intelligence and Security Informatics: Biosurveillance. BioSurveillance 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4506. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72608-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72608-1_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-72607-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-72608-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)