Abstract
Environmental epidemiology is the branch of epidemiology that pertains to the interaction of the disease with certain environmental factors. It studies hazards and conditions putative to pose imbalance to our health (disease, impairs, death), the burden of disease, the extent and limits of contamination, and the preventive steps that need to be taken.
A social network consists of a series of individuals or groups connected by links that represent some kind of relationship or interaction. The investigation of environmental social networks permits an evaluation of the influence that the connections between people have in the transmission of a given disease. The concept of neighborhood applied in social network analysis is illustrated based on graph theory, where adjacent points are nodes connected by a line and all the nodes that one point is connected with nearby nodes construct a neighborhood. In this chapter, a connection between social networks and epidemiology (especially in environmental and social aspect) would be introduced, introducing the spatial variability into the regional areas considering directional graphical models.
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Zimeras, S., Geronikolou, S. (2012). Social Networks in Environmental Epidemiology. In: Lazakidou, A. (eds) Virtual Communities, Social Networks and Collaboration. Annals of Information Systems, vol 15. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3634-8_13
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