The plague, which hit the virtual world in late September, quickly propagated, causing the temporary death of innumerable players and significant damage to large numbers of others. But it didn't have any lasting effect: Those hit by the disease were either healed or quickly reborn.When Erik Jacobson fell victim to a recent plague that ravaged the online game "World of Warcraft" and caused his character to squirt blood, he and other players laughed it off as a harmless bug that caused some temporary sickness. Buy cheap wow gold here ,we have cheap wow gold for sale !

"Similar to a natural virus, (which) in its DNA has the information encoded about what it's going to do, in a virtual world, when you have an outbreak, you have a piece of code with instructions about what it's going to do," said Yasmin Kafai, an associate professor of learning and instruction at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. But to some scientists and educators, virtual reality outbreaks like the one that slammed "World of Warcraft" could prove a valuable tool for studying the spread of infectious diseases--as well as public response to them. The correlation between online and real-world behavior in the face of epidemics, they say, takes on heightened significance in the face of public-health threats like a potential avian flu pandemic. You can buy cheap wow gold here !