Virtual plague offers real world clues
Updated on 21 August 2007
How online computer game World of Warcraft could teach important lessons about how diseases spread.
Far away in a distant forest, researchers have opened a new frontier in the study of infectious disease.
Zul'Gurub is the site of an outbreak of 'corrupted blood' - a deadly plague that can kill weaker humans in seconds, but can last in animals for much longer.
Zul'Gurub is not a remote village in the Amazon or the Congo, but a jungle area in the online computer game World of Warcraft.
Researchers at Tufts University still believe that the outbreak of 'Corrupted Blood' which started there in 2005 can teach important lessons about how diseases spread in the real world.
World of Warcraft is the world's most popular online role-playing game, with more than nine million subscribers around the globe.
Players explore a large, Tolkeinesque universe of dungeons, cities, forests and caves full of monsters and villains. The more they kill, the more powerful they get.
Blizzard Entertainment, the company which designed World of Warcraft, adds new areas to the Warcraft world all the time. Zul'Gurub was launched in 2005, with an arch-villain called Hakkar the Soulflayer.
Players who fought Hakkar were affected with a near-fatal disease, called Corrupted Blood. They could pass it to each other, but few survived long enough to pass it on for long.
Their pets, on the other hand, could catch it too, but wouldn't die as fast - and they brought the plague back to highly populated cities within Warcraft. The result was a pandemic, with widespread panic and reports of thousands of corpses piled up in the streets.
Players who fought Hakkar were affected with a near-fatal disease, called Corrupted Blood. They could pass it to each other, but few survived long enough to pass it on for long.
The disease was eventually cured by reprogramming the Warcraft servers. But the Tufts University researchers believe it has lessons for the real world.
In particular, they believe it shows how curious people will visit the site of a plague, even when told not to, and risk spreading the infection further, Nina Fefferman of Tufts told the Reuters news agency.
"Someone thinks, 'I'll just get close and get a quick look and it won't affect me,'" she said. "Now that it has been pointed out to us, it is clear that it is going to be happening. There have been a lot of studies that looked at compliance with public health measures.
"But they have always been along the lines of what would happen if we put people into a quarantine zone - will they stay? No one has ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave."
The study is published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
