Widespread quarantines. Bodies by the hundreds lying dead in the streets. A mass hysteria that converted once-bustling cities into ghost towns.
Such was the scenario in the fall of 2005, when a plague known as Corrupted Blood swept across the land.
Don't remember it? You might not have been logged on.
The calamity did not occur in the real world, of course. But the pandemiclike event that occurred in September 2005 in the online multiplayer realm of World of Warcraft has some researchers interested in whether such online environs could be used to predict the spread of infectious diseases in the real world.
ABC News August 21, 2007