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Well sex is a tad more intimate than a handshake.
I wouldn't call the research a scare tactic. Rather it's the first attempt to actually write down all the links in the network within a particular high school in a middle-sized town. If you want to be able to make predictions about the spread of disease, you need to have some reasonable estimate of the parameters of the contact network. Now we have that for this particular location and this particular type of contact.
Certainly people will be touting the research to support their particular political agenda. But you can never prevent that from happening, now would I want to.
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