When Erik Jacobson fell victim to a recent plague that ravaged the online game "World of Warcraft" and caused his character to squirt blood, he and other players laughed it off as a harmless bug that caused some temporary sickness.
The plague, which hit the virtual world in late September, quickly propagated, causing the temporary death of innumerable players and significant damage to large numbers of others. But it didn't have any lasting effect: Those hit by the disease were either healed or quickly reborn.
But to some scientists and educators, virtual reality outbreaks like the one that slammed "World of Warcraft" could prove a valuable tool for studying the spread of infectious diseases--as well as public response to them. The correlation between online and real-world behavior in the face of epidemics, they say, takes on heightened significance in the face of public-health threats like a potential avian flu pandemic.
Basically they are studying the way it spread to see if it can teach any lessons for real world pandemics.
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