Nature

Colubri, A., Williams, D., Valente, T. et al. Understanding human behaviour for pandemic preparedness with epigames. Nat. Health (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44360-026-00071-8

Infectious diseases that spread from person to person by direct transmission, including respiratory pathogens such as influenza and coronaviruses, impose a large global health burden and remain the most likely causative agents for future devastating pandemics1. For many such diseases, transmission occurs when individuals are in close proximity for a sufficient time and through highly structured social contact networks2. Data on the properties of these networks, including their temporal and spatial structures, how pathogens spread in them, and how interventions might alter this spread are scarce or inconsistent and seldom incorporate behavioural features. This produces a knowledge gap between policy-relevant models of pathogen transmission and the data they require: details of contact networks at high spatial and temporal resolution and their variability and malleability under different conditions.