Zombie Apocalypse: US Gov’t Study has Scientists, First Responders Researching Resistance

By Jim Kouri  /  ConservativeBase.com

With the recent entertainment fascination with science-fiction stories of the undead preying on the living on the big screen (World War Z with Brad Pitt) and on television (The Walking Dead) it was just a matter of time for the United States government to look into what’s known as Zombie Virus.

Despite no evidence of a Zombie apocalypse on the horizon, researchers at the government-run Argonne National Laboratory studied the topic and reported that it would take less than eight weeks for the undead to take control of Chicago, says a news story by the Homeland Security News Wire.

“Using a computational model developed to study the spread of less fictional diseases such as MRSA and Ebola, Argonne scientists found that it would take only sixty days for two million Chicagoans to be zombified,”stated the HSNW report.

While the worst-case war-game found there would be little, if any, resistance against the walking dead, strategies such as training first responders on how to kill Zombies or carry on communications from City officials that tell people how to avoid them provided some more optimistic outcomes.

“This offers great promise for countering the Zombie apocalypse in Chicago,” said Macal, director Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation Decision and Information Sciences Division at Argonne and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute.

In a report by Jim Kouri appearing in Conservative Base, this writer described how more than 30 Kent State University students spent seven weeks in 2014 investigating a Zombie apocalypse right in their own backyard.

They were enrolled in Zombie Outbreak, an emergency preparedness and biohazard course taught by Health Policy & Management Assistant Professor John Staley, Ph.D., MSEH, and Environmental Health Professor Christopher J. Woolverton, Ph.D. The course covers the emergency response system, what public health professionals do in a variety of disasters and individual responsibility for hazard preparedness.

On April 17, the class met with 10 City of Kent and Portage County officials to discuss appropriate courses of action in preparing for and responding to a virus-induced Zombie outbreak.  The students learned who is responsible for hazardous materials, biological health threats, emergency preparedness and response, as well as how information is verified  and communicated to the public during emergencies.  University and Kent city police and fire responders were represented as well.

Dr. Tara C. Smith is an Associate Professor in Epidemiology at Kent State University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD in Microbiology from the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Epidemiology at the University of Michigan.

Associate Professor Tara Smith, from Kent State University in Ohio, says zombie-like infections have been identified throughout the world and are becoming more common and a source of greater concern to public health professionals.

And yet there has been little formal study of the infections that may result in zombification of patients. She therefore provides an overview of zombie infections and suggestions for research investment in order to prevent a Zombie apocalypse:

Though the properties of zombies may vary, what unites many outbreaks is a disease that is spread via bite, explains Prof. Smith.

Of infectious causes proposed, the Solanum virus has been the most extensively studied. “It has a 100% mortality rate, and if exposed to fluids of an infected individual, zombification is certain.”

Non-viral Zombie causes include a form of the Black Plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, the cordyceps fungus, and a mutated strain of the prion infection, commonly known as “mad cow” disease.

Symptoms of infection during a Zombie outbreak tend to be fairly uniform, regardless of the nature of the pathogen, says Smith. The incubation period is highly variable, with development of symptoms ranging from mere seconds to hours or days.

Other symptoms may include a shambling gait, tendency to moan, loss of dexterity and prior personality traits, and the eventual rotting of flesh, she adds. In rare cases, Zombies may be highly intelligent and self-aware, and lacking in the typical bite-and-flesh-eating tendencies.

Due to the rapid onset of Zombie outbreaks and their society-destroying characteristics, prevention and treatment is a largely unexplored area of investigation, notes Smith.

She also points out that “equilibrium with the zombie infection is rarely achieved” and believes that the documented rise of multiple Zombie pathogens “should be a wake-up call to the international community that we need additional funding and cooperation to address these looming apocalyptic disease threats.”

The Zombie Survival Guide 2003 notes: “At this rate, attacks will only increase, culminating in one of two possibilities. The first is that world governments will have to acknowledge, both privately and publicly, the existence of the living dead, creating special organizations to deal with the threat. In this scenario, zombies will become an accepted part of daily life – marginalized, easily contained, perhaps even vaccinated against. A second, more ominous scenario would result in an all-out war between the living and the dead…”    

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