  Nowadays, one of the challenges we face when carrying out modeling of
epidemic spreading is to develop methods to control disease transmission. In
this article we study how the spreading of knowledge of a disease affects the
propagation of that disease in a population of interacting individuals. For
that, we analyze the interaction between two different processes on multiplex
networks: the propagation of an epidemic using the
susceptible-infected-susceptible dynamics and the dissemination of information
about the disease --and its prevention methods-- using the
unaware-aware-unaware dynamics, so that informed individuals are less likely to
be infected. Unlike previous related models where disease and information
spread at the same time scale, we introduce here a parameter that controls the
relative speed between the propagation of the two processes. We study the
behavior of this model using a mean-field approach that gives results in good
agreement with Monte Carlo simulations on homogeneous complex networks. We find
that increasing the rate of information dissemination reduces the disease
prevalence, as one may expect. However, increasing the speed of the information
process as compared to that of the epidemic process has the counter intuitive
effect of increasing the disease prevalence. This result opens an interesting
discussion about the effects of information spreading on disease propagation.

Physics and Society;Populations and Evolution