Question: How can maths help to study sexually transmitted infections spread through populations and how to control them?

Verity Hill answered on 13 Nov 2018:

I think Trystan is a good person to ask for this, but I have studied this a bit during my Masters, so I’ll give it a go!
STIs are interesting because you have to have a very specific type of contact (sex) to spread them, it’s not like flu where you can infect people that you just walk past. It’s a fun application of networks – you have a diagram of who has sex with who, and you can analyse the spread across it. This network analysis can tell you if somebody is spreading more than you might expect, or if there are groups of people that contribute more to spread than others. You can ask if you get one person to wear a condom (for example), how many cases would that avert? You can ask who you should target in a population to reduce transmission the most!