Money solves a lot of health care problems - just not always in the way you'd expect. Hunting for a new way to model the spread of disease, physicists from the Max Planck Institute and UC Santa Barbara grabbed data from Where's George?, an online project that tracks the geographic circulation of dollar bills. Why? Well, greenbacks, like most infectious diseases, travel only because people carry them. Follow the trajectories of 464,670 bills, the researchers figured, and you'd get a preview of how an outbreak of, say, avian flu could scatter throughout the US.
Previous disease models assumed that people disperse evenly over time, like a spritz of perfume in a closed room. Not so. In one week's time, the majority of bills made hops of less than 30 miles, but nearly a quarter touched down 30 to 500 miles from their starting point. And a small but significant number made it all the way across the country. Of course, this new model only predicts alternative ways a disease might move, but it could help officials determine where to deploy drugs and doctors. If only dollars replicated like viruses.
- Greta Lorge
credit Data for epidemiology graphic: D. Brockmann, Max Planck Institute
Seattle(yellow) / New York(red) Tracking dollar bills originating in Seattle and New York City provides a model for the spread of disease.
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