Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 6, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0021946
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Funding
- Spanish MICINN-FEDER [FIS2009-08451]
- Junta de Andalucia Proyecto de Excelencia [P09FQM-4682]
- Accion Integrada Hispano-Argentina, MICINN [AR2009-0003]
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Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all sizes, i.e., to be scale-free or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for accidental pathogens which leads to power-law distributed outbreaks without apparent need of parameter fine tuning. This model has been claimed to be related to self-organized criticality, and its critical properties have been conjectured to be related to directed percolation. Instead, we show that this is a (quasi) neutral model, analogous to those used in Population Genetics and Ecology, with the same critical behavior as the voter-model, i.e. the theory of accidental pathogens is a (quasi)-neutral theory. This analogy allows us to explain all the system phenomenology, including generic scale invariance and the associated scaling exponents, in a parsimonious and simple way.
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