It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
1. Identify the types of emergencies that are possible in your area. Besides a zombie apocalypse, this may include floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes. If you are unsure contact your local Red Cross chapter for more information.
2. Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane. Pick one place right outside your home for sudden emergencies and one place outside of your neighborhood in case you are unable to return home right away.
3. Identify your emergency contacts. Make a list of local contacts like the police, fire department, and your local zombie response team. Also identify an out-of-state contact that you can call during an emergency to let the rest of your family know you are ok.
4.Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.
SLEEPING SICKNESS
Sleeping sickness is the stuff nightmares are made of. The headline of this BBC News article from 2005 pretty much says it all: "The disease that makes people zombies." Prevalent in Africa, sleeping sickness is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma brucei and transmitted by the tsetse fly.
"At first it will cause headaches, aching muscles and maybe itching. But in the late stages, when the parasites have invaded the brain, the signs become more obvious and ominous. Victims find it hard to concentrate. They become irritable, their speech is slurred and they stop eating. Their daily rhythm becomes disrupted to such an extent that they can't sleep at night and find it almost impossible to stay awake during the day. It even becomes very hard for them to do simple mental tasks, such as drawing a straight line. This is an infection that carries nightmarish qualities, reducing many of its victims to a zombie-like state before they go into a coma and die. Those that do survive can be left with irreparable brain damage."
RABIES
There isn't a disease, be it mental or physiological, that makes people want to eat other people, at least none as currently recognized by medical science. (Cannibalism isn't considered a mental illness in its own right, but rather as a part of a larger web of psychoses.) There are certain culture-specific mental conditions - Wendigo psychosis, observed in certain native American peoples, is one of the better examples - that make people think they are turning into cannibals, but that's about it.
Still, rabies can, under certain conditions, approximate some of the conditions of the zombie lust for brains. The rabies virus causes massive inflammation, or swelling, of the brain, and it's most often transmitted by bites from infected animals. About 55,000 people die annually from rabies, with almost all of these deaths occurring in Asia and Africa. Although vaccines do exist (indeed, it was Louis Pasteur's successful treatment of a rabies-infected child that brought us into the modern age of vaccinations), they have to be administered before the onset of symptoms if the patient is to survive.
NECROSIS
Those of you who are up on your Greek roots already know where we're going with one: necrosis is death, specifically those of individual groups of cells before the organism as a whole dies. This isn't technically a disease but rather a condition with a lot of different possible causes. Cancer, poison, injury, and infection are all possible causes of premature cell death.
If we're being super-literal about what the walking dead really are, then a patient with necrotic tissue is maybe the closest equivalent. After all, a patient suffering from necrosis technically is partially dead, albeit still very much alive in all the important areas (the brain, the heart, and the rest of the vital organs, for a start) that we generally associate with the living.
Whatever its external (or, in the case of cancer or infarction, internal but extraordinary) cause, necrosis triggers a series of event that can lead to even greater negative effects outside the affected area. The dead tissue stops sending signals to the nervous system, and necrotic cells can release dangerous chemicals that hurt nearby, still healthy cells. If the lysosome membrane inside the cells is damaged, enzymes can be released that can also harm surrounding cells.
This chain reaction can cause the necrosis to spread (and if it spreads over a great enough area, it becomes gangrene) and can ultimately be fatal. The only way to cure the condition is through a process known as debridement, which is simply the removal of necrotic tissue. If the dead area is too large, this may require amputation.
If there is any sort of bright side to all this - and I'm not sure there is, but I'll put my Pollyanna hat on and try my best - at least necrosis isn't contagious, meaning it's not the sort of thing that could spur a faux-zombie outbreak. Of course, a sudden wave of hyper-aggressive, necrosis-spreading spiders or snakes? That might be another matter entirely.
DYSARTHIA
Let's take a bit of a break and talk about something relatively less serious. ("Relatively" being very much the key word there.) We've talked about possible causes of zombie-like trances, cell death, and hyper-aggression. What about something a little more innocuous, like the iconic moans and grunts of the oncoming zombie horde? What could cause that?
Well, the best real-world equivalent is probably dysarthria, which is a disorder affecting the motor controls of human speech. Dysarthria is particularly appropriate because it's neurological in its origins, which ties in with the brain-based aspects of zombie lore. There are a lot of different causes of dysarthric speech, but all are characterized by a malfunction in the nervous system that makes it difficult to control the tongue, lips, throat, or lungs.
This in turn causes difficulty in articulation, which can take the form (among many possible manifestations) of an inability to communicate in more than unintelligible noises. The condition can be brought on by traumatic brain injury, metabolic diseases like Lou Gehrig's or Parkinson's, or a stroke, all of which lead to a loss of control over the vocal muscles. Possible affected areas include the ability to regulate the volume of speech, the ability to create the proper inflection, and, most importantly for our purposes, the ability to create the correct sounds of speech.
To be sure, in and of itself dysarthria is not a particularly zombie-ish condition. However, coupled with any of the other diseases on this list, it gets you frighteningly close to a real approximation of the sight and sound of the walking dead.
LEPROSY
Both zombie folklore and leprosy have a long, long history. Armies of the flesh-eating undead can be traced all the way back to the roughly tenth century BCE Akkadian work The Epic of Gilgamesh, which drew on earlier Sumerian mythology and was one of the first substantial written works in human history. Cases of leprosy have been reported going back some four thousand years throughout Eurasia and northern Africa, including China, India, and Egypt. Considering a common feature of zombies is their rotting flesh and decaying body parts, it would seem like leprosy and its similar-sounding symptoms would be a natural inspiration for such stories.
Well...sort of. The truth is (as usual) rather more complicated. First of all, it's a myth that leprosy causes body parts to rot away and fall off - indeed, there really aren't any diseases that can actually make limbs fall off (although, as discussed earlier, necrosis can necessitate the amputation of dead limbs). Leprosy can cause damage and numbness in its victims, which could cause a slow, shuffling walk that might have inspired the gait that we associate with zombies. The main external symptom of leprosy is the outbreak of extensive skin lesions, which gives the skin a diseased, decaying appearance not unlike that of the common conceptions of zombies.
Fortunately, leprosy is pretty much under control at this point, certainly compared to sleeping sickness. Over 95% of people are naturally immune to the disease, and over fifteen million people have been cured of the disease in the last two decades. It's a remarkable turnaround for once of the most feared and stigmatized diseases in human history - indeed, for centuries leprosy evoked the same kind of irrational dread that we might now feel towards the dead rising from the graves en masse, ready to devour our brains.
Originally posted by chrismicha77
There IS a zombie disease and it's happened to cows not to long ago. Ever heard of Mad Cow Disease? This has been a worry by the CDC for sometime now spreading to humans. There is no case that I know of YET but then again we don't know jack when you think about it.
Anybody remember this from the CDC?
1. Identify the types of emergencies that are possible in your area. Besides a zombie apocalypse, this may include floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes. If you are unsure contact your local Red Cross chapter for more information.
2. Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane. Pick one place right outside your home for sudden emergencies and one place outside of your neighborhood in case you are unable to return home right away.
3. Identify your emergency contacts. Make a list of local contacts like the police, fire department, and your local zombie response team. Also identify an out-of-state contact that you can call during an emergency to let the rest of your family know you are ok.
4.Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.
Now alot of you will just say this is rubbish but there is something deeper to this.
Here are five diseases that could happen:
SLEEPING SICKNESS
Sleeping sickness is the stuff nightmares are made of. The headline of this BBC News article from 2005 pretty much says it all: "The disease that makes people zombies." Prevalent in Africa, sleeping sickness is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma brucei and transmitted by the tsetse fly.
"At first it will cause headaches, aching muscles and maybe itching. But in the late stages, when the parasites have invaded the brain, the signs become more obvious and ominous. Victims find it hard to concentrate. They become irritable, their speech is slurred and they stop eating. Their daily rhythm becomes disrupted to such an extent that they can't sleep at night and find it almost impossible to stay awake during the day. It even becomes very hard for them to do simple mental tasks, such as drawing a straight line. This is an infection that carries nightmarish qualities, reducing many of its victims to a zombie-like state before they go into a coma and die. Those that do survive can be left with irreparable brain damage."
RABIES
There isn't a disease, be it mental or physiological, that makes people want to eat other people, at least none as currently recognized by medical science. (Cannibalism isn't considered a mental illness in its own right, but rather as a part of a larger web of psychoses.) There are certain culture-specific mental conditions - Wendigo psychosis, observed in certain native American peoples, is one of the better examples - that make people think they are turning into cannibals, but that's about it.
Still, rabies can, under certain conditions, approximate some of the conditions of the zombie lust for brains. The rabies virus causes massive inflammation, or swelling, of the brain, and it's most often transmitted by bites from infected animals. About 55,000 people die annually from rabies, with almost all of these deaths occurring in Asia and Africa. Although vaccines do exist (indeed, it was Louis Pasteur's successful treatment of a rabies-infected child that brought us into the modern age of vaccinations), they have to be administered before the onset of symptoms if the patient is to survive.
NECROSIS
Those of you who are up on your Greek roots already know where we're going with one: necrosis is death, specifically those of individual groups of cells before the organism as a whole dies. This isn't technically a disease but rather a condition with a lot of different possible causes. Cancer, poison, injury, and infection are all possible causes of premature cell death.
If we're being super-literal about what the walking dead really are, then a patient with necrotic tissue is maybe the closest equivalent. After all, a patient suffering from necrosis technically is partially dead, albeit still very much alive in all the important areas (the brain, the heart, and the rest of the vital organs, for a start) that we generally associate with the living.