Via Wired's Campus blog:
Disease control specialists are looking at the WoW plague that broke out two years ago because it apparently modeled how real diseases spread.
One thing I thought of was that it was transmitted through animals to human(oids) - those hunter pets!?!#$#*! As if they're not OP enough already!!1!1eleven
The article from TimesOnline is pretty much info-free, unfortunately. It's just a teaser for the real study to be released next month in Lancet.
But call me provisionally skeptical that you could learn anything of use. People's WoW behavior doesn't model their real-world behavior because real world death isn't overcome by a simple corpse run. When the plague broke out I flew into Ironforge to try and cleanse as many people as I could. I kept myself and people around me alive until my mana ran out, then we found ourselves making said corpse run.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if that was an accurate predictor of behavior - if I were a doctor in real life. If it's a given that I head some medical capacity maybe I would have tried to help. Then when resources ran out I'd have been in the infected zone with no defense, and then eventually dead.
Of course, even then I ran right back in the middle of things to laugh it up some more, and died a second time. Had I not been a pally I would have flown into IF just to see it happen. Which I would emphatically not do in rl. So we'll see what this study has to say, but for now I'm a skeptic.
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