Follow money route to find disease trail

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By following the money trail, researchers may be able to predict an epidemic’s itinerary. A German-led study has used an online game to trace more than $450,000 worth of $1 bills through US, allowing scientists to develop a model of human dispersal that may prove critical in fights against flu or other easily transmitted diseases. ‘‘The study was to be able to attach a number to human travelling behavior,’’ said Dirk Brockmann, a theoretical physicist at the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Gottingen. ‘‘If you want to understand how epidemics spread, you need to make assumptions about how humans spread.’’ In a transportation age where a cough in China can easily lead to a sniffle in San Francisco, the assumptions can be complicated.

For a study to be published in Nature, Brockmann and two colleagues used data from http://www.wheresgeorge.com as a proxy for how people move. The game allows users to specify where they found a pre-marked bill, with each set of entries yielding a unique travel diary. One intrepid bill, for example, passed through eight states, assorted restaurants, a racetrack and a strip club on its journey of at least 4,191 miles.

Brockmann and colleagues scrutinised the first and second recorded locations of 464,670 Dollar bills. On one map, the study illustrates how Dollars moved within two weeks from three major cities: Seattle, Jacksonville, Fla., and New York City. After the bills’ initial entries, a majority reappeared within six miles of their origins, while a small but significant number had journeyed about 500 miles or more. ‘‘I think the greater significance of this is that human travel … obeys some quite simple, independent rules,’’ Brockmann said. The movement of Dollars suggested to his team that once people travel, probabilities of how far or how long they’ll go are independent of where they depart from.

Analysing the trajectories of bills allowed the researchers to uncover rules and create a mathematical model of the movement of people. Brockmann concedes that the model breaks down if population densities become too low or travel options too limited. Still, he believes simple but accurate assumptions may be key to realistic models of how a disease may spread — and how it may be contained with the right intervention. (Newsday)

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