Some critics call the WWW the “worldwide waste of time,” but researchers at the distinguished Max Planck Institute have used a curious little internet game to deduce how a pandemic might spread worldwide.
Seeking a means to track how humans might spread a contagious disease, Dirk Brockmann and Lars Hufnagel analyzed the travel routes of U.S. and Canadian paper currency featured on the website, Where’s George?. Since money travels with humans, Brockmann and Hufnagel could use the “behavior” of the bills as virtual radio tags to simulate the likely movements of infected travelers.
Here’s an excerpt from their Nature abstract:
Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. Surprisingly, the scientist found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws. They developed a mathematical theory which describes the observed movements of travellers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometres to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modelling of the spread of epidemics (Nature, 26 January 2006).
Click here for the full press release from the Institute.
Extrapolating from their conclusions, it seems unlikely that Asian bird flu will present much of a threat globally until either Asian and Turkish poultry farmers cash in their frequent-flyer miles or chickens learn to fly the transoceanic air routes. Perhaps I’m just a cynic, or woefully uninformed about pandemics, but all this fuss about the Asian bird flu here in the U.S. seems to be just another PR ploy by politicians to distract us from more pressing matters.
Before you epidemiologists jump all over me, I am aware that flu virus can mutate, can be passed from human to human through the air, and, as the 1918 flu epidemic demonstrated, kill tens of millions of people in a very short time. Americans (of the U.S.A. variety) just seem extraordinarily jumpy lately.
At Amazon.com:
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It
This reminds me of the “plagues” that struck some massively multiplayer online roleplaying games…. there was something on NPR about it, apparently it was an interesting lesson in the psychology of populations that are “attacked” by plague, so to speak. I look into it.
Meantime, check out my blog, http://futuregeek.blogspot.com. I cover a lot of the same things you do, you might find it interesting. Email me from there and I will tell you who I am and how I found your blog (I couldn’t figure out how to email you from here).
Peace.