The impacts of network topology on disease spread

Simulation of a disease in these networks showed a strong response to connectance pattern, even when the number of edges and vertices were approximately equal. Epidemic spread was fastest, and reached the largest size, in scale-free networks, then in random graphs. Regular lattices were the slowest to be infected, and rewired lattices were intermediate between these two extremes. Scale-free networks displayed the capacity to produce an epidemic even at a likelihood of infection, which was too low to produce an epidemic for the other network types. The interaction between the statistical properties of the network and the results of epidemic spread provides a useful tool for assessing the risk of disease spread in more realistic networks.