Posting notices on pre-school doors, texting friends and other ways of sharing information locally can stop outbreaks of infectious diseases, hints research published on Monday.

Such simple measures to spread information among friends and neighbors can have a big impact long before widespread warnings from the government and media, Sebastian Funk and colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Few people have studied this in much detail before,” Funk, a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

“What we found is this kind of local response can substantially reduce the number of people becoming ill and in some cases stop the outbreak as well.”

As an example, the researchers cited the 2003 outbreak in China of a new virus called severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS. People sent millions of text messages alerting family and friends to a “fatal flu” and urging them to wear face masks or stay home, the researchers said.

Funk and colleagues created a model in which they treated disease awareness as contagious and capable of moving from person to person through word of mouth. They did not study any specific outbreaks but hope to do so in the future, Funk added.

The model accounted for the reliability of information worsening as it moved through the population and considered first-hand information of far higher quality than knowledge acquired through several sources.

Those closest to the outbreak were most likely to act in what the researchers saw as a locally initiated, informal spread of awareness that could form a protective cordon around the disease.

This suggests that the chances of dramatically slowing or even stopping an outbreak are highest if people in their local communities can recognize a disease early on and rapidly disseminate information about it, Funk said.

“We concluded that this kind of locally initiated awareness may play an important role in dealing with an epidemic even if there are no official guidelines,” he added.

LONDON (Reuters)