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Real-world use of virtual epidemics

Posted on August 21, 2007

Is World of Warcraft the ultimate weapon for fighting SARS and bird flu?It just might be, according to an interesting paper in the latest issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases about using virtual worlds to understand real epidemics.Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren, epidemiologists at Tufts University in Massachusetts, focus on a disease outbreak that occurred in World of Warcraft in September 2005. The game's creators introduced the fictional disease called Corrupted Blood to a restricted area of the game and were shocked to find it spread so rapidly throughout the rest of the virtual world. ...

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