Summary: Reviews of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complexity. Edited by Heinz Georg Schuster
Copyright c 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
Human Mobility and Spatial Disease Dynamics
Introduction and Motivation
The understanding of human mobility and the development of qualitative
models as well as quantitative theories for it is of key importance in the re-
search of human infectious disease dynamics on large geographical scales.
Xia et al. state succintly :
"Spatial transmission of directly transmitted infectious diseases is ulti-
mately tied to movement by the hosts. The network of spatial spread
(the disease's spatial coupling) may therefore be expected to be related
to the transportation network within the host metapopulation"
In our globalized world, mobility and traffic have reached a complexity and
volume of unprecedented degree. More than 60 million people travel billions
of miles on more than 2 million international flights each week as illustrated