The cover story in the current issue of medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases (subscription only) is "The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics." The article focuses on the accidental "corrupted blood" disease that recently spread through World of Warcraft. The researchers from Tufts University School of Medicine are using the virtual plague to explore how humans might behave when faced with a similar situation in the real world. From the BBC News:
Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: "Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.
"The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game…
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.
Link to BBC News, Link to The Lancet Infectious Diseases (article abstract is free with reg) (via MAKE: Blog)
