Fighting Epidemics in the Information and Knowledge Age
Hau Zhuge and Xiaoqing Shi, Chinese Academy of Sciences
IEEE Computer 35:10:115, Oct 2003
“We have simulated the spread of SARS and shown that isolation control measures had no significant effect on containing the epidemic’s outbreaks (http://kg.ict.ac.cn)–an outcome counterintuitive to the thinking of many people and some governments, which sought to combat the disease by implementing measures more or less blindly…
“Our research shows that SARS only spreads through a small subset of the threatened society. Simulation results tell us that the number of people infected is sensitive to population density… The Beijing survey shows that the largest close-contact infection tree covered only 37 people.
“This characteristic makes analyzing the SARS spread network feasible. We can think of it as a network of cliques–small, close-contact spread subnetworks. People within the same clique share some common socieal roles–belonging, for example, to the same family or workplace–and are more likely to infect each other than to infect people belonging to different cliques…
“Drawing an analogy between the spread network and the Web’s hyperline network reveals some similarities… but the spread networks nodes and arcs constitute a more complex structure than the Web’s structures. This relationship lets us view the hyperlink network as a special case of the spread network.
“Research on web page distribution shows that the page rank obeys the power-law distribution: the high rank nodes account for only a minute proportion of all the network’s nodes. This result also applies in the spread network.
“Humanity’s natural resilience to infection proved most important in curbing SARS. Natural resistance also plays a role at the society and ecosystem levels. A health society and ecosystem can maintain the harmony of existence by nurturing the resilience necessary to resist some invasions while evolving to resist others.”
I’ve expounded on these health issues at length on my Electronic Medicine website. There is no more effective way to improve natural resilience than to enhance one’s own immune system with a patented extract of colustrum called Transfer Factor Plus. I’m using it as I write on an airplane from Atlanta to Boston to eliminate the viruses and bacteria that are rampant in these enclosed capsules. There is no more infectious clique today than your fellow passengers on an airplane. You can find out more about preventing infection, including serious diseases like SARS, by giving my colleague Dale Fawcett a call at(360)598-6585.