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Sexual contacts and epidemic thresholds

Nature volume 423, page 606 (2003)Cite this article

Liljeros et al. reply

Jones and Handcock have reanalysed two of our four data sets of the number of different sexual partners for Swedish men and women. Specifically, they analyse the probability-distribution function p(k), which yields less reliable information than the cumulative distribution,

that we used in our analysis, and they propose that the tails of p(k) decay with a power-law exponent ρ > ρc = 3, which is larger than the threshold value above which the variance of the distribution is finite. They also question whether public-health strategies need to be refocused in view of their inferred existence of epidemic thresholds.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, Solna, 171 82, Sweden

    Fredrik Liljeros

  2. Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, 106 91, Sweden

    Fredrik Liljeros, Christofer R. Edling & Y. Åberg

  3. Department of Physics, Centre for Polymer Studies, Boston University, Boston, 02215, Massachusetts, USA

    H. Eugene Stanley

  4. Department of Chemical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, 60208, Illinois, USA

    Luis A. N. Amaral

Authors
  1. Fredrik Liljeros
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  2. Christofer R. Edling
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  3. H. Eugene Stanley
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  4. Y. Åberg
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  5. Luis A. N. Amaral
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fredrik Liljeros.

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Liljeros, F., Edling, C., Stanley, H. et al. Sexual contacts and epidemic thresholds. Nature 423, 606 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/423606a

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