Speaker
Dr
Petter Holme
(Coputational Biology)
Description
In spite of advances in hospital treatment, hospitals
continue to be a breeding ground for several airborne
diseases and for diseases that are transmitted through
close contacts like SARS, methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), norovirus infections and
tuberculosis (TB). Here we extract contact networks for up
to 295,108 inpatients for durations up to two years from a
database used for administrating a local public healthcare
system serving a population of 1.9 million individuals.
Structural and dynamical properties of the network of
importance for the transmission of contagious diseases are
then analyzed by methods from network epidemiology. The
contact networks are found to be very much determined by an
extreme (age independent) variation in duration of hospital
stays and the hospital structure. We find that that the
structure of contacts between in-patients exhibit structural
properties, such as a high level of transitivity,
assortativity and variation in number of contacts, that are
likely to be of importance for the transmission of less
contagious diseases. If these properties are considered when
designing prevention programs the risk for and the effect of
epidemic outbreaks may be decreased.
