Finally, in all models discussed here we also investigated the effect of allowing for different individual rates associated with the way each individual creates or destroys her social ties. Due to agestructure of most populations or intrinsic individual or cultural differences, some individuals will tend to react differently whenever they, or a contact, get infected [36, 38] . In the Text S1 we show that the disease spreading remains unaffected when individual rates (of seeking and removing links) are drawn from a normal distribution with variable variance, as long as the average value for the rate remains unchanged.