A beginner's guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse.
Is a pandemic the best time to develop your zombie apocalypse plan? We can learn a surprising amount from the current situation. After all, no-one mentioned that the apocalypse would involve epic missions to find toilet paper or washing your hands to the tune of Happy Birthday. So let’s get started.
Looks like we’re a bit low on candles and gaffer tape…
The first step is to make sure you are prepared. Obviously we all have a zombie apocalypse drawer, that’s a given, we just need to make sure it is up to date. No you do, honestly. Where do you keep your spare batteries? Candles and matches? Pen knife and first aid kit? Well there you are. It may be a box or cupboard, but the key thing is to have it all in the same place. It makes it easier in an emergency, tip out the drawer into a bag, add wet kit and a jumper and away you go.
We keep emergency birthday cards in ours; just because it’s an apocalypse doesn’t mean you have to let standards slip.
It is obviously important to get this preparation right, luckily the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA has a Zombie Preparedness plan which includes an All-Hazards Emergency Kit list.
Next step is to not get bitten. This means looking out for people who show symptoms of the disease. According the the British Medical Journal (BMJ), symptoms of zombiism include: aggression, a taste for human flesh, ‘a shambling gait, tendency to moan loss of dexterity and prior personality traits, and the eventual rotting of flesh.’ (Smith, 2015) The real issue here is the incubation period, the time during which someone is infectious but shows no symptoms, this can range from a few seconds to several days. It’s therefore best to keep your distance.
As we mentioned in our podcast episode, you need to keep an eye out for people around you who might hide a zombie bite; known as ‘rat-lickers’ they should be avoided at all costs.
What do you do if you get bitten? According to the BMJ, the rapid onset and devastating impact of the disease on society, has resulted in very little research into the prevention and treatment of the zombie plague. This means if you are infected there is unlikely to be a cure. Sorry about that. Your best bet is to remove the part that has been bitten, this would prevent the infection spreading through the body to the brain.
What about a vaccine? The real issue here is laboratory availability. Very few are able to provide proper containment of the pathogens, or indeed zombies themselves (Smith, 2015). In addition, herd immunity is just not going to work, once you are infected you will become a zombie, there are very few cases of natural immunity. We simply cannot reply on a vaccine solving the problem. As Smith (2015) states ‘even if an effective treatment were developed, it may need to be taken perpetually to prevent the affected person from reverting to zombiism.’
There are lots of unanswered questions around the rise of zombies. Recent research from Sheffield University (see below) suggests rather than fighting and killing zombies, which increases the risk of infection and the spread of the pathogen, our best bet is to domesticate them. Failing that hide from them, preferably in a prison or the Northern Rockies. Happy Halloween everyone…