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professor of Population Biology and Epidemiology
She acknowledged that a virtual setting might encourage riskier behaviour, but said this could be estimated and allowed for when drawing conclusions. Constraint She said a major constraint for epidemiologists studying disease dynamics at the moment was that they were limited to observational and retrospective studies. For example, it would be unethical to release an infectious disease in real life in order to study what the consequences might be. Computer models allow for experimentation on virtual populations without such limitations, but still rely on mathematical rules to approximate human behaviour. A virtual world may be a way to bridge this gap, said Professor Fefferman. Her team at Tufts are looking to use models such as the World of Warcraft to further study human behaviour, particularly in relation to disease outbreaksDr Gary Smith, professor of Population Biology and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania, has been working on modelling infectious diseases. He said: "Very few mathematical models of disease transmission take host behaviour into account."