Spatial epidemiology of networked metapopulation: An overview

Lin WANG; Xiang Li

Although the performance of public healthcare systems has been improved prominently to weaken the threat of emerging diseases, it is impossible to entail a world free of infectious pathogens [55] . From the beginning of this new century, we have already witnessed several cases of the large-scale geographic transmission of pandemics. In 2003, through the international airline network, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) was rapidly transmitted from Hong Kong to more than 30 countries [56, 57] . Several years later, in 2009, the A(H1N1) swept across the world through public transportation networks again: With only 3 to 4 months, it had spread over about 200 countries [58] [59] [60] [61] . Recent potential invasion of avian influenza A(H7N9) poses a new challenge [62] [63] [64] [65] . It seems that the widespread risk of emerging diseases is higher than before. This urgent circumstance stems from the changes of human social ecology in population distribution as well as human mobility patterns [66, 67] . Crowded metropolises resulting from the urbanization process induce people's frequent contacts, and the fast development of massive transportation (e.g., civil aviation) generates a nonlocal pattern of human mobility, sharply reducing the time of travel as well as the distance between populous cities.