Social contact study

A team from Warwick and Liverpool Universities (lead by Matt Keeling and Jon Read) have recently received funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to investigate the patterns of social contacts in the UK. Knowing how many other people we meet is an important step in understanding how many people we can spread infection to, our risk of catching infection, and the effectiveness of many control strategies. Our aim is to better predict the spread of pandemic influenza and therefore be able to provide health-care agencies with a better understanding of the types of control that are needed. Using postal surveys and web-based questionnaires we hope to record the contact patterns during a single day of around 100,000 people in the UK (approximately 0.16% of the population).