Randomized treatments may be more effective at stopping disease outbreaks

Herding cats is a cakewalk compared with getting people to take flu vaccine shots in the last weeks of summer—work, school, limited pharmacy hours, beach days and countless other factors conspire to interfere. As a result, vaccinations tend to trickle in over many months. Rather than resisting this tendency, some mathematicians now think that public health officials may one day embrace it. A bit of randomness in treatment schedules may actually help manage a disease outbreak. Read more here.