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Mobile sensors help track H1N1 transmission patterns
December 14, 2010 ? 3:25pm ET | By Neil Versel
Last winter's outbreak of the H1N1 "swine flu" virus caused a lot of consternation and panic among the public, and left many an epidemiologist and physician scrambling for credible information to share with the concerned citizenry.
"Do you know how many contacts you have with infectious people on a daily basis? Do you know how many contacts you have with anybody on a daily basis?" Stanford University anthropologist James Holland Jones asks, according to the Stanford Report, a house organ. "Very often, those are the things we know the least about because they're the hardest to measure."
Jones and other researchers at the Palo Alto, Calif., school, used wireless sensors to track everyone who passed through an unnamed American high school one day last January, during the height of the H1N1 outbreak. Each student, teacher and staff member wore a credit card-size transmitter that tracked the person's location every 20 seconds....more at the link
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But it doesn't matter if you're a teacher or a student or a staff member, or whether you're popular or not. Everyone's pretty much the same when it comes to transmission of the flu."