Researchers list top 10 airports for spreading disease
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 12:37 AM EDT, Thu July 26, 2012
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Civil and Environmental Engineering department looked at the 40 largest U.S. airports and figured out which ones would be the most likely to spread a disease in the event of an outbreak in the cities they serve.
They factored in passengers' travel patterns, the airports' geographic locations, interactions between airports and even passenger waiting times for their study, published July 19 in the journal PLoS ONE.
One of the surprises in their findings was that an airport's ranking on the researchers' list was not necessarily tied to its size or busyness.
