Hsieh Chih-Sheng, Kovářík Jaromír, Logan Trevon
Department of Economics, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
1] Department of Economics I &Bridge, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) [2] CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University in Prague and the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Sci Rep. 2014 Dec 18;4:7540. doi: 10.1038/srep07540.
Sex workers are traditionally considered important vectors of transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STI). The role of clients is commonly overlooked, partially due to the lack of evidence on clients' position in the sexual network created by commercial sex. Contrasting the diffusion importance of sex workers and their clients in the map of their sexual encounters in twoWeb-mediated communities, we find that from diffusion perspective, clients are as important as sex workers. Their diffusion importance is closely linked to the geography of the sexual encounters: as a result of different movement patterns, travelling clients shorten network distances between distant network neighborhoods and thus facilitate contagion among them more than sex workers, and find themselves more often in the core of the network by which they could contribute to the persistence of STIs in the community. These findings position clients into the set of the key actors and highlight the role of human mobility in the transmission of STIs in commercial sexual networks.
性工作者传统上被视为性传播感染（STI）的重要传播媒介。嫖客的作用通常被忽视，部分原因是缺乏关于嫖客在商业性行为所形成的性网络中地位的证据。通过对比性工作者及其嫖客在两个网络介导社区的性接触地图中的传播重要性，我们发现，从传播角度来看，嫖客与性工作者同样重要。他们的传播重要性与性接触的地理分布密切相关：由于不同的流动模式，流动的嫖客缩短了遥远网络邻域之间的网络距离，因此比性工作者更能促进其间的传染，并且他们更常处于网络核心位置，从而可能导致性传播感染在社区中持续存在。这些发现将嫖客纳入关键行为者范畴，并凸显了人口流动在商业性网络中性传播感染传播方面的作用。
