Facebook accounts and telephone records can be used to prevent the best individuals from spreading disease in their tracks, researchers said on Wednesday.

Such people would be "central" in their social network, and thus would prefer to spread the microbes produced from one group to another.

Suppose that there is an outbreak, and not enough vaccinations for every person in the world, preventing these well-connected individuals will remove the social "bridges", which can spread the germ, experts wrote in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface...

The study, in which digital and physical contacts of more than 500 university students were detected, concluded that the people who are in the center of their digital network.

There are human networks in their real life, "If you are a hub for your friends that you have a phone call Or there are many contacts on Facebook, you are making a bridge between different communities, then it is likely that you are likely to become a bridge to connect those communities. Mr. kind, such as influenza, "study co-author Aeneas Mons of the Technical University of Denmark, told AFP.

"By understanding online contacts, we can find individuals who are such central members of the population and focus on counter-targeted targeted measures when there are limited resources for immunization."

Using computer modeling, research has also calculated that vaccination of these "central" individuals would be "almost as efficient as the most favorable (existing) vaccination strategies".

It was also cheaper because digital activity is easy to detect. The target of immunization is to reduce the size of the population at the risk of infection. It receives something called "Swarm Immunity", so the inauspicious people are not likely to come in contact with an infectious person.