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‘Zombie apocalypse’ trending as bad news spreads quickly
The term “zombie apocalypse” has been lighting up the internet all week and has been among the top Google trends Friday morning.
On the Web’s Urban Dictionary, here’s definition No. 4 of zombie apocalypse: “The End of the World, when people who have died rise again in rotten corpses searching for blood and brains to strengthen them.”
While we’re certain the dead are not rising, the past week has seen some of the most disturbing instances of human behavior imaginable.
A man in Miami happens upon a homeless man on the sidewalk and chews off 75% of his face in an 18-minute attack. The attacker’s mother later says her son is not a zombie as portrayed in the media.
Authorities in Canada have launched a massive manhunt for a suspect after a severed hand was sent to Canada’s Liberal Party, a foot to the Conservatives and a torso was stuffed in a suitcase and tossed in the trash of the Montreal apartment building where he lived.
A Maryland man admits to killing his housemate, cutting him up, then eating his heart and part of his brain.
A New Jersey man rips his torso open and throws bits of his intestines at police,according to the Bergen Record.
There have been other equally grisly crimes, but there’s no need to dwell on them.
Fact is, horrible crimes happen all the time.
“This is all nothing new,” said Scott Talan, professor of public communication at American University, with a long work history in public relations and the media.
Bad news attracts attention, he said, and when it happens in bunches, people like to attach a name to it, hence, “zombie apocalypse.”
People also like to see others in bigger trouble than they have themselves, Talan said.
“No matter how your life’s going, someone’s got it worse,” he said.
We like to think, “I’m better off than these people,” he said.
And that’s nothing new, Talan said, pointing out that ancient Roman philosophers used to lament that citizens felt little for the gladiators and what happened in their gruesome contests.
But he said while these stories catch fire quickly in our wired world, they flame out quickly, too.
Unless there’s another gruesome crime today, expect the zombie apocalypse to be done by next week, he said.
Even if that’s the case, there may be some good that can come of the attention zombie apocalypse has drawn on the Web.
A year ago, when zombie movies were the rage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said if it could convince the public to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, maybe they’d be better prepared for disasters more likely to affect their lives, like earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, or a major pandemic.
Or maybe the Mayan apocalypse. Talan points out that it isn’t real, it’s just a name like zombie apocalypse.
But then again, that isn’t supposed to happen until December. There’s still time for that go viral again.
Inside zombie brains: Sci-fi teaches science
- A new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” is about, well, zombies
- The zombie virus basically eats the brain down to the amygdala
- When it’s humans vs. zombies, the best solution is a strategic attack, mathematician says
Zombie author and expert Dr. Steven Schlozman will join us for a Twitter chat at 12:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, April 26. Tweet your questions to @cnnhealth and follow along at #cnnzombies.
(CNN) — An airborne virus is rapidly turning people into zombies. Two-thirds of humanity has been wiped out. Scientists desperately look for a cure, even as their own brains deteriorate and the disease robs them of what we consider life.
Relax, it’s only fiction — at least, for now. This apocalyptic scenario frames the new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” by Dr. Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist who holds positions at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Program in Child Psychiatry.
You might not expect someone with those credentials to take zombies seriously, but it turns out the undead are a great way to explore real-world health issues: why certain nasty diseases can destroy the brain, how global pandemics create chaos and fear, and what should be done about people infected with a highly contagious and incurable lethal illness.
“One of the things zombie novels do is they bring up all these existential concerns that happen in medicine all the time: How do you define what’s alive?” says Schlozman, who has been known to bounce between zombie fan conventions and academic meetings.
“When is it appropriate to say someone’s ‘as-good-as-dead,’ which is an awful, difficult decision?”
What a zombie virus would do to the brain
So maybe you’ve seen “Night of the Living Dead,” read “World War Z,” or can’t wait for the return of the AMC show “The Walking Dead,” but you probably don’t know what differentiates the brains of humans and zombies.
First things first: How does the zombie disease infect its victims? Many stories in the genre talk about biting, but Schlozman’s novel imagines a deliberately engineered virus whose particles can travel in the air and remain potent enough to jump from one person to another in a single sneeze.
Now, then, to the brain-eating. The zombie virus as Schlozman describes it basically gnaws the brain down to the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for the “fight or flight” response. The zombies always respond by fighting because another critical part of the brain, the ventromedial hypothalamus, which tells you when you’ve eaten enough, is broken.
The brain’s frontal lobes, responsible for problem-solving, are devoured by the virus, so zombies can’t make complex decisions. Impairment in the cerebellum means they can’t walk well, either. Also, these humanoids have an unexplained predilection for eating human flesh.
“The zombies in this book are stumbling, shambling, hungry as hell,” Schlozman said. “Basically they’re like drunk crocodiles; they’re not smart, they don’t know who you are or what you are.”
Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies
How a zombie virus would be made
So the bloodthirsty undead wander (or crawl) around spreading a lethal illness ominously called ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome, or ANSD, for short.
“When something really terrifying comes along, especially in medicine or that has a medical feel to it, we always give it initials. That’s the way we distance ourselves from it,” Schlozman said.
The virus has several brain-destroying components, one of which is a “prion,” meaning a protein like the one that causes mad cow disease. In real life, prions twist when they are in an acidic environment and become dangerous, Schlozman said. How our own environment has changed to make prions infectious — getting from the soil to the cows in mad cow disease, for instance — is still a mystery.
Now here’s something to send chills up your spine: In Schlozman’s world, airborne prions can be infectious, meaning mad cow disease and similar nervous-system destroyers could theoretically spread just like the flu. Swiss and German researchers recently found that mice that had only one minute of exposure to aerosols containing prions died of mad cow disease, as reported in the journal PLoS Pathogens. A follow-up described in Journal of the American Medical Association showed the same for a related disease that’s only found in animals called scrapie. Of course, these are mice in artificially controlled conditions in a laboratory, and humans do not exhale prions, but it could have implications for safety practices nonetheless.
Like mad cow disease, the zombie disease Schlozman describes also progresses in acidic environments. In the book, a major corporation doles out implantable meters that infuse the body with chemicals to artificially lower acidity when it gets too high. But, sadly, when acidity is too low, that also induces symptoms that mimic the zombie virus, so it’s not a longterm solution. Everyone who gets exposed eventually succumbs, Schlozman said.
As for the unknown component of the zombie disease that would help slowly zombifying researchers in their quest for a cure, that’s up for the reader to figure out — and the clues are all in the book, Schlozman said.
How we’d fight back
You can’t ethically round up fellow survivors to kick some zombie butt unless the undead have technically died. And in Schlozman’s book, a group of religious leaders get together and decide that when people reach stage four of the disease, they are basically dead. That, of course, permits zombie “deanimation,” or killing.
The ‘zombie theology’ behind the walking dead
And how do you kill a zombie? Much of zombie fiction knocks out zombies through shots to the head. That, Schlozman said, is because the brain stem governs the most basic functioning: breathing and heartbeat.
A zombie-apocalypse disease like the one he describes probably wouldn’t evolve on its own in the real world, he said.
But, as we’ve seen, individual symptoms of zombies do correspond to real ailments. And if they all came together, the disease would be creepily efficient at claiming bodies, Schlozman said.
Bad news, folks: Even if people contracted a zombie virus through bites, the odds of our survival aren’t great.
A mathematician at the University of Ottawa named Robert Smith? (who uses the question mark to distinguish himself from other Robert Smiths, of course), has calculated that if one zombie were introduced to a city of 500,000 people, after about seven days, every human would either be dead or a zombie.
“We’re in big, big trouble if this ever happens,” Smith? said. “We can kill the zombies a bit, but we’re not very good at killing zombies fundamentally. What tends to happen is: The zombies just win, and the more they win, the more they keep winning” because the disease spreads so rapidly.
The best solution is a strategic attack, rather than an “every man for himself” defense scenario, he said. It would take knowledge and intelligence, neither of which zombies have, to prevail.
Why study zombies?
In his day job, Smith? models how real infectious diseases spread. But he’s already reaped benefits from his work on zombies. For instance, while many mathematical models only deal with one complicated aspect of a situation at a time, he tackled two — zombie infection and zombie-killing — when it came to speculating about outbreaks.
When it came time for modeling of real-world human papillomavirus (HPV), then, Smith? felt equipped to handle many facets of it at the same time, such as heterosexual and homosexual transmission of HPV.
“Knowing what we knew from zombies allowed us to actually take on these more complicated models without fear,” he said.
Studying zombies is also a great way to get young people excited about science. Smith?, who was on a zombie-science panel with Schlozman through the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange in 2009, has also seen math-phobic people get interested in mathematics by reading about his work with zombies.
“There are insights that we gain from the movies, and from fiction, from fun popular culture stuff, that actually can really help us think about the way that science works, and also the way science is communicated,” he said.
And as to why people like reading about zombies and watching zombies so much, Schlozman points to the impersonal nature of things in our society, from waiting in line in the DMV to being placed on hold on a call with a health insurance company.
Think about all the situations in daily life where you sense a general lack of respect for humanity, and zombies make a little more sense.
“The zombies themselves represent a kind of commentary on modernity,” Schlozman says. “We’re increasingly disconnected. That might be the current appeal.”
Zombie Outbreak – Miami ‘zombie’ attacker may have been using ‘bath salts’
A naked man who chewed off the face of another man in what is being called a zombie-like attack may have been under the influence of “bath salts,” a drug referred to as the new LSD, according to reports from CNN affiliates in Miami.
The horrific attack occurred Saturday and was only stopped after a police officer shot the attacker several times, killing him.
Larry Vega witnessed the attack on Miami’s MacArthur Causeway. He told CNN affiliate WSVN he saw one naked man chewing off the face of another naked man.
Rudy Eugene
“The guy was like tearing him to pieces with his mouth, so I told him, ‘Get off!'” Vega told WSVN. “You know it’s like the guy just kept eating the other guy away, like ripping his skin.”
“It was just a blob of blood,” WSVN quoted Vega as saying. “You couldn’t really see, it was just blood all over the place.”
Vega said he flagged down a passing police officer.
“When the officer approached him, told him to stop, pointed a gun at him, he turned around and growled like a wild animal and kept eating at the man’s face,” Fraternal Order of Police President Armando Aguilar told CNN affiliate WPLG.
Augilar said he suspects the attacker, identified as 31-year-old Rudy Eugene, was under the influence of “bath salts.” Four other drug use instances in Miami-Dade bear resemblances to Saturday’s attack, he told WPLG.
“It causes them to go completely insane and become very violent” and take off their clothes, Augilar told WPLG.
Dr. Paul Adams, an emergency room physician at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, told CNN affiliate WBFS that the drug makes users delirious. They exhibit elevated temperatures and extreme physical strength, Adams said.
“I took care of a 150 pound individual who you would have thought he was 250 pounds,” WBFS quoted Adams as saying. “It took six security officers to restrain the individual.”
Adams said users have been known to use their jaws as weapons, according to WBFS.
According to a 2011 report from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, bath salts contain amphetamine-like chemicals.
“Doctors and clinicians at U.S. poison centers have indicated that ingesting or snorting ‘bath salts’ containing synthetic stimulants can cause chest pains, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, agitation, hallucinations, extreme paranoia, and delusions,” according to the NIDA report.
In October, the Drug Enforcement Administration made possession of the stimulants in bath salts, Mephedrone, 3,4 methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) and Methylone, illegal under an emergency order. The order lasts for a year with a possible six-month extension.
The stimulants have been placed under restrictions or banned in 37 states, according to a DEA press release.
The victim of Saturday’s attack, whom police have not identified, was in critical condition at Jackson Memorial on Monday, according to the WPLG report. Augilar told WPLG that 75% to 80% of his face was missing.
Eugene had an arrest record, mostly misdemeanors, including a battery charge from when he was 16 that was later dropped, according to the Miami Herald.
He had been married but divorced in 2007, WPLG reported. His former wife told the station that Eugene had been violent toward her.
Homeless people near where the attack took place said Eugene was often seen around the area looking confused, according to WPLG.
Giant cannibal shrimp invasion growing
An invasion of giant cannibal shrimp into America’s coastal waters appears to be getting worse.
Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that sightings of the massive Asian tiger shrimp, which can eat their smaller cousins, were 10 times higher in 2011 than in 2010.
“And they are probably even more prevalent than reports suggest, because the more fisherman and other locals become accustomed to seeing them, the less likely they are to report them,” said Pam Fuller, a USGS biologist.
The shrimp, which can grow to 13 inches long, are native to Asian and Australian waters and have been reported in coastal waters from North Carolina to Texas.
They can be consumed by humans.
“They’re supposed to be very good. But they can get very large, sorta like lobsters,” Fuller said.
While they may make good eatin’ for people, it’s the eating the giant shrimp do themselves that worries scientists.
“Are they competing with or preying on native shrimp,” Fuller asked. “It’s also very disease-prone.”
To try to get those answers, government scientists are launching a special research project on the creatures.
“The Asian tiger shrimp represents yet another potential marine invader capable of altering fragile marine ecosystems,” NOAA marine ecologist James Morris said in a statement. “Our efforts will include assessments of the biology and ecology of this non-native species and attempts to predict impacts to economically and ecologically important species of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.”
Scientists are uncertain how many of the giant shrimp are in U.S. waters.
In 1998, about 2,000 of the creatures were accidentally released from an aquaculture facility in South Carolina. Three hundred of those were recovered from waters off South Carolina, Georgia and Florida within three months.
Farming of the giant shrimp ended in the United States, but they were caught again off Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana and Florida.
Five were caught off Texas last year, according to Tony Reisinger, country extension agent for the Texas Sea Grant Extension Service.
Scientists don’t know if there is a breeding population in U.S. waters. Tiger shrimp females can lay 50,000 to a million eggs, which hatch within 24 hours. Or the shrimp may be carried here by currents or in ballast tanks of marine vessels.
The latest study will look at the DNA of collected specimens.
“We’re going to start by searching for subtle differences in the DNA of Asian tiger shrimp found here – outside their native range – to see if we can learn more about how they got here,” USGS geneticist Margaret Hunter said in a statement. “If we find differences, the next step will be to fine-tune the analysis to determine whether they are breeding here, have multiple populations, or are carried in from outside areas.”
Volcanic activity recorded at Mexico’s ‘Popo’
Mexico City (CNN) — Scientists recorded continuing volcanic activity Tuesday in Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano, which sits just southeast of Mexico City and its more than 19 million residents.
Local government officials and residents began taking precautions, with schools in the zone near the volcano closing Tuesday and the government advising residents to close windows and avoid the outdoors.
Activity had decreased in Popocatepetl overnight, but eight exhalations of low intensity were recorded, Mexico’s National Center for the Prevention of Disasters said.
A low amplitude tremor lasting 40 minutes early Tuesday morning was also felt, the agency said.
Officials placed the alert at Popocatepetl — which means “Smoking Mountain” in the native Nahuatl language — at Yellow Level 3. This means there is a probability of explosive activity of an intermediate to high scale, an eruption of lava and a spewing of ash.
A glow was visible inside the crater overnight, the agency said.
Popocatepetl is one of Mexico’s highest peaks and last had a major eruption in 2000. It is located in a national park southeast of Mexico City and can be seen from there on a clear day.
Already, scientists have observed a continuous column of water vapor and moderate amounts of ash rising from the crater. Falling ash was reported in the city of Puebla, the capital of the state.
A seven-mile perimeter around the volcano has been cleared, and the Puebla state government asked residents to limit travel between cities near the volcano.
To guard against falling ash, residents should close doors and windows, cover water tanks and food and avoid outdoor activities, the government said.