Jan. 11, 2012 Humans are considered the hosts for spreading
epidemics. The speed at which an epidemic spreads is now better
understood thanks to a new model accounting for the provincial
nature of human mobility, according to a study published in EPJ
B. The research was conducted by a team lead by Vitaly Belik
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, who is also
affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-
Organization, Germany. The authors modelled human mobility as
recurrent trips centred around a home base. The model accounted
for the bi-directional travels around a central node,
representing their home location and forming a star-shaped
network. Previous models were based on diffusion and would imply
that people travel randomly in space, not necessarily returning
to their home location. These do not accurately describe the
high degree of predictability in human mobility. The researchers
found that older diffusion-based models overestimated the speed
at which epidemics spread.