Social network fragmentation and community health

Significance Fragmentation of social networks is needed in large-scale treatment campaigns. Direct vaccination of key individuals or the strategic provision of health education can prevent, respectively, the spread of viruses or misinformation. We present an easily implementable and generalizable network-based strategy for targeting households to induce fragmentation in social networks of low-income countries. Complete friendship and health advice networks were collected from 17 rural villages in Uganda. We discovered that acquaintance algorithms outperformed conventional field-based approaches for inducing social network fragmentation. Acquaintance algorithms targeted the neighbors of randomly selected nodes, whereas the latter method concerns targeting well-established community roles such as lay health workers, village government leaders, and schoolteachers. This algorithm also was effective in offsetting potential noncompliance to deworming treatments.