The U.S. government is gearing up for the potential arrival of bird flu as concerns grow that it could soon show up on U.S. shores with migrating birds. Meanwhile researchers are learning how infectious diseases, such as a human form of bird flu, might spread by studying how money migrates.
Thanks to the website www.wheresgeorge.com¾ which traces the travels of money around the country and around the world ¾ University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Lars Hufnagel has developed a model of how infectious diseases spread locally, from person to person, as well as from city to city.
"We've quantified how humans move around within the country, so we can combine it with this local infection dynamics and then generate predictions how an infection will, will spread within the United States," says Hufnagel, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoritcal Physics at UCSB.
Hufnagel and his colleagues first ...
