  We study the effects of switching social contacts as a strategy to control
epidemic outbreaks. Connections between susceptible and infective individuals
can be broken by either individual, and then reconnected to a randomly chosen
member of the population. It is assumed that the reconnecting individual has no
previous information on the epidemiological condition of the new contact. We
show that reconnection can completely suppress the disease, both by continuous
and discontinuous transitions between the endemic and the infection-free
states. For diseases with an asymptomatic phase, we analyze the conditions for
the suppression of the disease, and show that, even when these conditions are
not met, the increase of the endemic infection level is usually rather small.
We conclude that, within some simple epidemiological models, contact switching
is a quite robust and effective control strategy. This suggests that it may
also be an efficient method in more complex situations.
