Transportation
The U.S. Airports Most Likely To Influence the Spread of Global Disease
The worst culprits aren't necessarily the ones you'd expect.
In the age of globalization, disease spreads about as quickly as commerce, news and ideas do. Take, for instance, the 2003 SARS outbreak. It quickly dispersed from Hong Kong to 37 countries (killing nearly 1,000 people), and this happened, in part, because of airplane travel.
We now know that airports are key nodes in the spread of global pandemics, although all airports obviously don’t influence this process in the same way. You might assume that the busiest airport hubs would create the biggest ripple effect in exposing a global population to a local outbreak. But new research published in the journal PLoS ONE suggests the network of how and where people travel through airports (taking contagion with them) is much more complicated.