...In the event (click here) of a pandemic outbreak of bird flu or the new MERS virus, public officials might want to look at quarantining children and teachers first—a new study has found that young people and school teachers are prime candidates to spread infection, due to the amount of "social contact" they have each day.
Anyone who has watched chicken pox spread through a classroom may think the study's findings are just common sense, but tracking disease as it moves through a population has been tough, especially with highly contagious, airborne infections like the flu.
The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, tracked the social interactions of about 5,000 British people. It found that average person had about 26 hours of contact with other people per day (when someone was in close contact with multiple people at once, the time with each person was counted). But some groups had much more contact than the average person, including children (47 hours), health workers (33 hours), people in the service industry (33 hours), and teachers (32 hours).
"There was a big hole in our knowledge about how people interact," Leon Danon, of the University of Warwick and lead author of the study, said. "We had to make a lot of assumptions about patterns of interactions and their networks that might facilitate infectious disease transmission. Now we've got a general overview about what social patterns are like."...
