Online 'Pandemic' a Virtual Gold Mine for Epidemiologists

Aug. 21, 2007 — -- Widespread quarantines. Bodies by the hundreds lying dead in the streets. A mass hysteria that converted once-bustling cities into ghost towns.

Such was the scenario in the fall of 2005, when a plague known as Corrupted Blood swept across the land.

Don't remember it? You might not have been logged on.

The calamity did not occur in the real world, of course. But the pandemiclike event that occurred in September 2005 in the online multiplayer realm of World of Warcraft has some researchers interested in whether such online environs could be used to predict the spread of infectious diseases in the real world.

"There are actually parallels between what would happen in the real world and what happened in this game," said Nina Fefferman, professor of applied mathematics at Rutgers University.

Fefferman is lead author of a research paper released Monday in the journal the Lancet Infectious Diseases examining the lessons of the Corrupted Blood pandemic and how they might be applied to real world disease control efforts.

"This gives us the opportunity in the future to tailor infections in the virtual world to see what would happen in the real world," she said.

World of Warcraft is a game in which players from around the world log on, interact and develop their characters in a fantasy setting. For these players, it's the ultimate in interactive recreation. But for researchers, the game holds tantalizing promise as a social model in which the conditions may be readily manipulated.

"Here, we have a large-scale computer simulation where we know everything about the disease, but its spread is determined largely by human behavior," said study co-author Eric Lofgren, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"This is all free from the fact that you can't do this sort of thing in the real world because it would be horrifyingly unethical."

Some epidemiologists agreed that while the Corrupted Blood incident might not bear a direct similarity to a real-world infection, the spread of the online "disease" was an intriguing occurrence.