The way this friendship paradox works is as follows: If a person is asked to name a friend, that friend is statistically likely to be more popular than the original individual. Such "popular" individuals typically interact with more people increasing the likelihood of their coming into contact with flu and becoming sick from it earlier than those who are not as popular.
This finding kind of reminds of how miners use a canary bird as an early warning system to see if there are toxic levels of carbon monoxide present before it causes harm to humans.
Read a Reuters story on this research here.
