Research

Global behavior of epidemic transmission on heterogeneous networks via two distinct routes

Haifeng Zhang^1,2 , Michael Small² and Xinchu Fu³

¹School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Anhui University, Hefei 230039, China

²Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

³Department of Mathematics, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China

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Nonlinear Biomedical Physics 2008, 2:2doi:10.1186/1753-4631-2-2

Published:	1 May 2008

Abstract

In the study of epidemic spreading two natural questions are: whether the spreading of epidemics on heterogenous networks have multiple routes, and whether the spreading of an epidemic is a local or global behavior? In this paper, we answer the above two questions by studying the SIS model on heterogenous networks, and give the global conditions for the endemic state when two distinct routes with uniform rate of infection are considered. The analytical results are also verified by numerical simulations.