Les Jones

Science > Vaccinate Thy Neighbor

Here's a new idea in vaccinations that's especially interesting now that the U.S. is experiencing shortages of flu vaccine. The idea is to vaccinate only people who have lots of acquaintances (and who therefore are more likely to spread a given disease) in order to minimize the number of people who need to be vaccinated. Via jwz.

Reuven Cohen of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his colleagues propose a simple modification of random vaccination that is more effective, according to their computer simulations. The idea is to randomly choose, say, 20% of the individuals and ask them to name one acquaintance; then vaccinate those acquaintances. Potential super-spreaders have such a large number of acquaintances that they are very likely to be named at least once, the researchers found. On the other hand, the super-spreaders are so few in number that the random 20% of individuals is unlikely to include many of them.

Using the team's vaccination strategy, a disease can be stopped by vaccinating less than 20% of the individuals, in some cases, according to their computer model of a human population. The method can also be tweaked: if a larger sample is asked for names, and those named twice are vaccinated, the total number of vaccinations required can be even lower.

There are obvious privacy concerns that prevent this from being a routine immunization strategy, but it could be crucial in the event of a bioterror attack.