Learning About Disease From the World of Warcraft

By studying how people behave during disease outbreaks in virtual online worlds, epidemiologists hope to uncover real-world epidemic insights.

Two years ago, so-called Corrupted Blood swept the World of Warcraft. (Wikipedia describes the outbreak here.) A new Lancet Infectious Disease study found that players responded as they might in the real world: some risked infection to save others. Some fled. And some spread the disease intentionally.

As the BBC reports, it's difficult to study real-world epidemics:

She said a major constraint for epidemiologists studying disease dynamics at the moment was that they were limited to observational and retrospective studies.

For example, it would be unethical to release an infectious disease in real life in order to study what the consequences might be.

Computer models allow for experimentation on virtual populations without such limitations, but still rely on mathematical rules to approximate human behaviour.

Of course, a virtual world is necessarily virtual -- but it's another tool in the epidemiological toolbox.

Virtual game is a 'disease model' [BBC]

The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics [Lancet Infectious Diseases]