Virtual life surprised some scientists recently by behaving just like a real ecosystem, when a plague created to challenge high-level players in World of Warcraft actually escaped its containment and spread among the general population -- carried by travel, pets, and stupid behavior, just as a real germ would.

The episode around the electronic pandemic, called "Corrupted Blood," inspired a Journal Lancet Infectious Diseases report on ways the online world might be useful in disease studies. "The disease had spread to the densely populated capital cities of the fantasy world, causing high rates of mortality and, much more importantly, the social chaos that comes from a large-scale outbreak of deadly disease," the article read.

The difference between virtual worlds and prior disease models is that the somewhat random factor of human behavior and how it contributes to the spread of academics could not be studied in such a realistic way before. For example, "No one has ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave," said Nina Fefferman, a medical epidemiologist who worked on the report.

Fefferman will now incorporate the similar kinds of behaviors into her model scenarios, and will also continue working with Blizzard to model disease outbreaks in other games.

[Via MSNBC]