Spread of infectious diseases in directed and modular metapopulation networks.

We consider epidemics in metapopulations on different network topologies. Recent work on epidemics on networks has focused on epidemics of humans. In this work we present a model for epidemics on directed networks, which are found, for example, in the livestock trade. We show that the direction of edges and the modular structure of networks have an impact on the outbreak size and the time of the outbreak peak. In some circumstances, the outbreak size in directed networks can even be larger than in undirected systems. The results presented here could be useful for decision-making processes in directed modular systems.