The study of social networks, and in particular the spread of disease on
networks, has attracted considerable recent attention in the physics community.
In this paper, we show that a large class of standard epidemiological models,
the so-called susceptible/infective/removed (SIR) models can be solved exactly
on a wide variety of networks. In addition to the standard but unrealistic case
of fixed infectiveness time and fixed and uncorrelated probability of
transmission between all pairs of individuals, we solve cases in which times
and probabilities are non-uniform and correlated. We also consider one simple
case of an epidemic in a structured population, that of a sexually transmitted
disease in a population divided into men and women. We confirm the correctness
of our exact solutions with numerical simulations of SIR epidemics on networks.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure