Health and disease game: microbes, infection, defences and vaccines
A health and disease game where you do instead of choose. In “Stop the outbreak” there is a grid of people with one sick person and some immune: you vaccinate three and run the infection, which passes from neighbour to neighbour, generation by generation; well-placed vaccines act as a firebreak. With a slider you find what share of the population must be vaccinated for each sick person to infect fewer than one (1 − 1/R₀). There is also completing a disease card —which microbe causes it, drawn, and how it spreads— and sorting microbes, infectious or non-infectious diseases, whether antibiotics work, lines of defence and types of immunity.
Biology · Secondary, Sixth form
The most widespread health myth is that antibiotics cure flu. Every time a disease appears the game asks whether antibiotics can attack its microbe, and the explanation recalls why taking them needlessly breeds resistant bacteria.
Skin and mucus are barriers; inflammation, fever and phagocytes are the non-specific defence; lymphocytes and antibodies are the specific one, the one with memory. Everyday cases (a wound that swells, never catching chickenpox again) make you name each one.
If each sick person infects three, cases go 1, 3, 9, 27…: they multiply, they do not add. And to stop a disease with R₀ = 4 you must vaccinate at least 75 % (1 − 1/R₀). That is the idea of herd immunity, shown with a drawing.
"The sick person is next to an edge and there are three vaccines. The student vaccinates three people at random and the outbreak escapes through the middle; next time they place them around it against the edge and two immune people, and only four fall ill. They have understood the firebreak."
Prefer to learn without screens? Try this analogue version:
One person in the class puts a little glitter on their hand: they are the «sick» one.
They shake hands with two classmates, and each of them with two more. Count how many have glitter after each round.
Play again, but this time half the class wears gloves («vaccinated») and neither catches nor passes it on.
Compare: how much does the outbreak grow with and without vaccinated people? Wash your hands well afterwards.
If you like Outbreak!, these activities work similar skills:
More practice on · Biology
Health and Disease
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