Networks of influence and infection: parental choices and childhood disease - PubMed (original) (raw)

Networks of influence and infection: parental choices and childhood disease

Ken T D Eames. J R Soc Interface. 2009.

Abstract

Clusters of unvaccinated individuals are at risk of outbreaks of infection. When an individual's decision to choose vaccination is influenced by the choices of his social group, such clusters can readily arise. However, when the interactions that influence decision-making and those that permit the transmission of infection are different--for instance, when parents make vaccination decisions on behalf of their children--it is unclear how large the impact of this social influence will be. Here we use a modelling approach to represent social influence within a network of parents and the transmission of infection through a network of children. We show that the effect of social influence depends on the amount of overlap between the two different networks; large overlap means that clusters of parents who choose not to vaccinate are likely to have interacting children, generating clusters of unvaccinated children. Spatially local connections can further increase the impact of social influence. Outbreaks are most likely when parents who do not vaccinate have children who interact.

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Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

(a) The model population consists of a network of parents (black, above) and a network of children (grey, below); in both networks, links (black lines) are formed locally. Each parent has exactly one child, who shares his spatial location (illustrated by grey vertical lines). Not all links between parents correspond to links between their offspring. (b) Outbreak probability with (Ω = 1, grey) and without (Ω = 0, black) opinion formation for varying vaccination coverage. The parent and offspring networks share all connections (i.e. F = 1); T = 0.2. The inset box shows how the difference in outbreak probability for Ω = 1 and Ω = 0 varies across the different stochastically generated networks (bars from 5th to 95th percentiles, with the mean shown as a cross). (c) As given in (b), but F = 0.2.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

(a) Impact of shared contacts, F, on the effect of opinion clustering, Δ. Results are shown for different local thresholds: T = 0.1 (circles), T = 0.2 (crosses), T = unlimited (triangles). (b) Impact of amount of agreement between parents; c = 80 per cent and β is varied. Shown is the probability of an outbreak for F = 0.2 (grey) and F = 1 (black) and for agreement between parents of 0.68 (i.e. random vaccination, solid line), 0.75 (triangles) and 0.85 (circles); T = 0.2.

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