TITLE:
Topological and Historical Considerations for Infectious Disease Transmission among Injecting Drug Users in Bushwick, Brooklyn (USA)
AUTHORS:
Kirk Dombrowski, Richard Curtis, Samuel Friedman, Bilal Khan
KEYWORDS:
Social Network Analysis; Injecting Drug Users; Scale-Free Networks
JOURNAL NAME:
World Journal of AIDS,
Vol.3 No.1,
March
28,
2013
ABSTRACT: Recent interest by physicists in
social networks and disease transmission factors has prompted debate over the topology
of degree distributions in sexual networks. Social network researchers have
been critical of “scale-free” Barabasi-Albert approaches, and
largely rejected the preferential attachment, “rich-get-richer” assumptions that underlie that model.
Instead, research on sexual networks has pointed to the importance of homophily
and local sexual norms in dictating degree distributions, and thus disease
transmission thresholds. Injecting Drug User (IDU) network topologies may
differ from the emerging models of sexual networks, however. Degree
distribution analysis of a Brooklyn, NY, IDU network indicates a different
topology than the spanning tree configurations discussed for sexual networks,
instead featuring comparatively short cycles and high concurrency. Our findings
suggest that IDU networks do in some ways conform to a “scale-free” topology,
and thus may represent “reservoirs” of potential infection despite seemingly low
transmission thresholds.