Most importantly they discovered that most of the transmissions occurred in the first couple of years, they report in PLoS Computational Biology.

BBC: Spread of hepatitis C pinpointed

The secret, the researchers report in the open access journal Plos Computational Biology, is in their ability to take cues from one another - just like an insect swarm.

BBC: Robot ants: mini-machines mimic insect colony

The result, according to Larry Hunter, president of the International Society of Computational Biology, is that there is a desperate shortage of specialists capable of developing the computational tools that biologists need.

ECONOMIST: Drowning in data

The study, published in 2009 in one of the journals of the Public Library of Science, PLoS Computational Biology, also showed that patients who developed diseases that tend to coincide with many others were more likely to die sooner than people whose diseases were more tangentially connected.

WSJ: Genes May Link Disparate Diseases