Battling The Swine Flu In Cyberspace

Do you remember the Swine Flu or Influenza A(H1N1) that hugged the news headlines for a long while about two months ago? The disease was even declared by World Health Organization (WHO) to have  reached pandemic level worldwide. Battling the spread of the swine flu by our local health authorities was reported round by round in our broadcast and printed media. For my part I blogged about Influenza A (H1N1) and its effect on Internet café business if someone found positive of the disease happened to have visited a café during the contact tracing by the authorities. I even suggested ways to mitigate the spread of A (H1N1) virus in a café in another blog during the height of the threat being posed by the disease.

If you are wondering if I will discuss here whether the threat of the spread of the disease is already gone or not, I want to say that I am not. Correct me if I am wrong but there is no news on its status at present. What we have on the news theses days are about the vaccine being developed to immunize people against A (H1N1) virus.

“Battling the swine flu in cyberspace” is about a new online computer game designed to make people think about how to respond to the swine flu pandemic. The game, entitled “The Great Flu“, informs people how the virus spreads, what the flu is and on the ways to fight the pandemic. In the game, players must choose whether or not to stockpile anti-viral drugs and deploy research teams to new areas of outbreak as the number of infections and deaths rises and more countries are affected.

The Great Flu was developed before the swine flu outbreak seized the headlines and it was originally designed for Dutch teenagers. The game was put online in the early part of 2009 at www.thegreatflu.com and was reported to be attracting more than 1,000 visitors a day with peaks of up to 40,000. The game is very realistic and has an educational value but some reviews said was flawed because it was unclear what effect the action that players took had on the virus. However, because of its educational value the game could breed up a generation of future officials that does understand how to economically contain a pandemic disease.

You may be wondering why I make reviews of games that is different from the hackenslash ones favored by café gamers. I say, I do such because I believe that children of minor age must be allowed to play computer games like The Great Flu because of its educational value. I am against allowing them to play violent and addictive games.