Social network analysis in epidemiology: Current trends and perspectives

The increasing development of world trade has promoted the spread of diseases. Recent events, like the H₁N₁ outbreak and spread, have confirmed this tendency. Everyone could observe that this kind of infectious disease often has the ability to cross countries borders and spread rapidly. Preventing, monitoring and controlling the outbreak of these diseases have appeared to be a public health problem of primary importance for years. However, although numerous works have been conducted in order to understand and study epidemics, this subject remains a topical issue because of the complexity of the phenomena. In this paper, we present new opportunities offered by the field of social networks for understanding the spread of infectious diseases. This work focuses both on techniques already used in epidemiology, and very recent works in social network analysis that open new perspectives. We give an overview of methods currently used to model and study the spread of diseases and future directions that the social network approach allows to glimpse.