American airports to kick-start global epidemic

Published: 25 July, 2012, 21:34

The release of any infectious disease into the wild could quickly spawn a serious epidemic if certain factors are afoot. A new study reveals that airports in Hawaii, New York and Chicago could be the main catalysts when it comes to contamination.

Exactly how easily could one deadly contagion be distributed across the entire Earth? Researchers at MIT have published the results of a new study that examines the spread of serious diseases, and their tests suggest that an outbreak exposed to passengers at certain American airports could cause the rest of the world to become quickly vulnerable, more so than if an epidemic is unleashed at any other locales in the States.

The team at MIT has published their findings in a new paper, A Metric of Influential Spreading during Contagion Dynamics through the Air Transportation Network, which takes into consideration how, where and why certain illness can spread in the sky.

“The spread of infectious diseases at the global scale is mediated by long-range human travel. Our ability to predict the impact of an outbreak on human health requires understanding the spatiotemporal signature of early-time spreading from a specific location,” the scientists write in the paper’s abstract.

FULL STORY: http://rt.com/usa/news/epidemic-airport-honolulu-lax-051/