Epidemic diffusion processes in a system of U.S. military camps: transfer diffusion and the spread of typhoid fever in the Spanish-American War, 1898.

The writers analyze the geographical transmission of a typhoid fever epidemic in the makeshift encampments of a mobilized army in 1898 in the U.S. war with Spain. They contend that the spread of typhoid was underpinned by a temporally ordered sequence of diffusion processes in which each process wa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 91; no. 1; pp. 71 - 92
Main Authors: Smallman-Raynor, Matthew, Cliff, Andrew D.
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd March 2001
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:The writers analyze the geographical transmission of a typhoid fever epidemic in the makeshift encampments of a mobilized army in 1898 in the U.S. war with Spain. They contend that the spread of typhoid was underpinned by a temporally ordered sequence of diffusion processes in which each process was related to a discrete stage of the epidemic cycle. They argue that the processes mirrored the spatial transfer of regiments, the geographical proximity of camps, and the position of camps in the transient population size hierarchy. However, they report that the strength and timing of the processes varied by corps.