Kate Winslet in a scene from the film Contagion. Photograph: AP/Warner Bros.
Kate Winslet proclaims the line with a purposeful clarity. "The average person," she tells Matt Damon in the trailer for the forthcoming film Contagion, due for release this week, "touches his or her face three to five times every waking minute. In the meantime, we're touching doorknobs, water fountains, each other." Winslet plays Dr Erin Mears, one of the medics struggling to contain a pandemic that is threatening civilisation.
The film could hardly have come at a more opportune time for researchers at Warwick and Liverpool universities. "It focuses on how many contacts we make during each day and how highly infectious diseases spread through the population," says Matt Keeling, professor of maths and biology at Warwick. "That's exactly what we're looking at."
His colleague Dr Leon Danon, a
research fellow in the university's Mathematics Institute, says Contagion will provide a much-needed boost to their attempts to track our interactions with other people. "Already we're getting responses from those who have seen the trailer," he goes on. "We've even discussed getting students to stand outside cinemas and hand out flyers."
Respondents are asked to think back to the previous day and recall what they did, who they met and talked to, how they were greeted, how far they travelled and by what means. "This important research will give us a better idea of how to control infections and understand who the main at-risk groups are," says Keeling. Danon puts it rather more starkly: "This stuff will save lives and, at the very least, fewer people will catch the
flu." Flu viruses are passed on in various ways. "Physical skin-to-skin contact, not just kissing, is important, says Danon. "So you can catch flu through shaking hands with someone already infected. Flu can also spread through the air with no physical contact necessary, which is why we ask respondents to tell us about those people they had conversations with. It's also possible to catch flu by touching an item that has been touched by an infected person, but only for a few hours afterwards. How well the virus survives and is still able to infect depends on the environmental conditions, including temperature and humidity."
By tracking thousands of patterns of human interaction, the researchers hope to be able to predict more accurately the spread of pandemic flu and therefore provide healthcare agencies with the information to monitor and tackle outbreaks with the most cost-effective solutions.
The project started soon after the avian flu scare of 2008 and will end in March next year, when funding of £679,294 from the
Medical Research Council runs out. One of the more prestigious medical journals will be offered the chance to publish the results but, before then, the researchers are hoping to at least double the 6,000 respondents.
"We need at least 10,000," Danon says. Women and retired people are over-represented. The academics are working with a marketing company on ways of targeting men and have started taking survey forms into schools. Keeling is keen to get more schoolchildren and people under 30 to take part. "They're currently under-represented in the survey yet they're probably the most important groups in spreading the infection," he says.
Schools have rightly been pinpointed as breeding grounds of infection. Says Danon: "The swine flu outbreak of 2009 died down once the school holidays started, and one proposition for containing future epidemics and pandemics could be the closure of schools at critical moments. That way you'd buy a couple of weeks to roll out vaccines."
Preliminary results suggest that teachers are high on the list of professions in greatest need of preventative measures. "It may be intuitive that certain people and occupations have higher numbers of contacts than others," Danon accepts, "but the most important part of our work is quantifying these effects and differences. How much more are teachers at risk than cleaners? Without the numbers, we can't accurately model epidemics and predict their future characteristics. Accurate predictions are the key for this work to be useful for public health."
Outside the Mathematics Institute, a bus pulls up, packed with people under 30. Plastered the length of it is an advertisement in stark letters: CONTAGION.
