The relevance of social network concepts to sexually transmitted disease control

Many of the concepts of social network analysis have been tacit assumptions of sexually transmitted disease control efforts for decades, With the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, an overt rapprochement between these two fields - previously separated by culture, context, and language - was made, Social network constructs have immediate appeal to disease control workers, who devi many diseases as following the conduits of social interactions, STDs and HIV, in turn, provide network analysts and those who model disease transmission with substantial sets of empirical data that test and illuminate theory. Disease control efforts can he enchanced by incorporating network concepts overtly into current practices, Such concepts offer a path to better delineation of groups at risk, to a better understanding of the interaction of personal risk taking and the social contest, and to evaluation of control mechanisms.