Should We Treat Obesity Like a Contagious Disease?
Becoming obese isn't like catching a cold, but a handful of research groups are now trying to model obesity in a population by treating it like a social contagion that spreads among people through their interactions. Statistician David Allison and information scientist Keisuke Ejima of the University of Alabama in Birmingham and mathematician Diana Thomas of the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, have been working on refining such obesity models.