  We carry out an analytic investigation of stochastic oscillations in a
susceptible-infected-recovered model of disease spread on a network of $n$
cities. In the model a fraction $f_{jk}$ of individuals from city $k$ commute
to city $j$, where they may infect, or be infected by, others. Starting from a
continuous time Markov description of the model the deterministic equations,
which are valid in the limit when the population of each city is infinite, are
recovered. The stochastic fluctuations about the fixed point of these equations
are derived by use of the van Kampen system-size expansion. The fixed point
structure of the deterministic equations is remarkably simple: a unique
non-trivial fixed point always exists and has the feature that the fraction of
susceptible, infected and recovered individuals is the same for each city
irrespective of its size. We find that the stochastic fluctuations have an
analogously simple dynamics: all oscillations have a single frequency, equal to
that found in the one city case. We interpret this phenomenon in terms of the
properties of the spectrum of the matrix of the linear approximation of the
deterministic equations at the fixed point.
