Impact of inter-city interactions on disease scaling.

ABSTRACT: Inter-city interactions are critical for the transmission of infectious diseases, yet their effects on the scaling of disease cases remain largely underexplored. Here, we use the commuting network as a proxy for inter-city interactions, integrating it with a general scaling framework to describe the incidence of seven infectious diseases across Brazilian cities as a function of population size and the number of commuters. Our models significantly outperform traditional urban scaling approaches, revealing that the relationship between disease cases and a combination of population and commuters varies across diseases and is influenced by both factors. Although most cities exhibit a less-than-proportional increase in disease cases with changes in population and commuters, more-than-proportion

SUBMITTER: Loureiro NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11696764 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature