It seems that a popular Web site in the United States that tracks the geographical circulation of money could cast new light on predicting where infectious diseases like bird flu might pop up.
Researchers say that like money, diseases are carried by people around the world, so what better way to plot the spread of a potential influenza pandemic than to track the circulation of dollar bills.
The German and U.S. researchers developed a mathematical model of human travel that can be used to plot the spread of future pandemics.
According to Dr Dirk Brockmann, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Gottingen, Germany, there are some universal rules governing human travel and they can be used to develop a new class of model for the spread of infectious disease.
The research is particularly relevant at present as world health experts fear the H5N1 bird flu virus that has killed at least 82 people in six countries since 2003, will mutate into a highly infectious strain in humans that could cause the next pandemic.
Brockmann says they are now able to plug in the parameter ranges that they think will apply to influenza and then simulate a pandemic that runs through Europe to see what happens.
He says in addition to giving insights into how an infectious disease would spread, mathematical models and computer simulations could help to develop measures to be used against it.
Human movement is a main cause of the spread of infectious disease but with modern-day travel involving boats, planes, trains, cars and other means of transport it is virtually impossible to compile a comprehensive set of data on travel.