Social network fragmentation and community health.

ABSTRACT: Community health interventions often seek to intentionally destroy paths between individuals to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Immunizing individuals through direct vaccination or the provision of health education prevents pathogen transmission and the propagation of misinformation concerning medical treatments. However, it remains an open question whether network-based strategies should be used in place of conventional field approaches to target individuals for medical treatment in low-income countries. We collected complete friendship and health advice networks in 17 rural villages of Mayuge District, Uganda. Here we show that acquaintance algorithms, i.e., selecting neighbors of randomly selected nodes, were systematically more efficient in fragmenting all networks than targ

SUBMITTER: Chami GF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5594644 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature