Some people are so careful about avoiding sickness while others simply take it as a fact of life. It’s no wonder the flu spreads so easily when things like hand holding, plate sharing, and simply passing pens around can so easily spread germs. I find that many of us also hold a personal bias- when another person is sick, we hope that they carefully release each sneeze into a tissue and follow through with an elaborate and immaculate hand washing ritual - but, when the tables turn, a sneeze is just another sneeze, and hand washing would be a tedious and time consuming task. As this situation persists, the flu virus propagates.

Now, a Center for Disease Control Panel is urging doctors to give a flu vaccine to all children. Though children tend to show lesser symptoms than their older counterparts, sick children have a profound effect on parents. It is interesting to track how networks play into this entire situation. The flu virus can maneuver its was through what is comparable to an undirected graph and, while its effects are probably more powerful in a strong tie than a weak tie, as more tends to be shared within a strong relationship, it is does not discriminate between positive and negative ties. Flu propagates infinitely and, though it is unpleasant to think about, with the easy passage of germs, a person can quickly find himself stuck in an endless network of people he may never knew even exist. Edge are drawn with every turn of a door handle and large “flu networks” easily become one cohesive whole. Finally, this network leaks into another larger, corporate network when parents have to take days off from work to stay home with their sick children. This undoubtedly has an effect on the work environment and may even begin to weaken ties between colleagues as a result of canceled meetings or unreturned phone calls.

The flu vaccine can help this pattern. With this growing epidemic, it will be interesting to see how the availability of this high demand vaccine will break up this seemingly endless network of flu contractors and possibly simultaneously expose greater issues such as the limits of health care.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/02/27/flushots.kids.ap/index.html