Anotherealm Forum
http://anotherealm.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl
General Category >> General Board >> How contagious are zombies?
http://anotherealm.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1445911752

Message started by Adrienne_Ray on Oct 26th, 2015, 10:09pm

Title: How contagious are zombies?
Post by Adrienne_Ray on Oct 26th, 2015, 10:09pm

In the spirit of Halloween, I thought we should look at the zombie condition. Walkers, zombies, whatever you choose to call them, every plot I can recall has the entire world infested with the undead with only a smattering of live humans left to save civilization. I have heard that if such a small amount of humans were left they would not be able to repopulate the world even if the undead were subdued.
But I have to ask, would the zombie contagion ever get this far?
zombies spread their disease by biting an uninfected human. If that is the only way it can be spread, small pox is much more contagious because it is airborn. So how is it we haven't been wiped out by small pox?
Walkers spread their disease by biting people. But in the Walking Dead, all humans also carry the disease for some other reason yet unexplained and will become a walker if they die for any reason. I suspect we will find out that the walkers' disease will turn out to be a biological weapon that got out of control because a disease like that, if it occurred naturally would not have spread like it does.
In Night of the Living Dead, it was spread by an asteroid. So it was spread over a large area. Even at that, in the original movie it looked like the humans were going to be victorious.
What say you, readers of anotherealm, would zombies take over the world? Or would we quickly figure out what was causing the problem and quarantine the walkers before they got out of control?

Title: Re: How contagious are zombies?
Post by Webbie on Nov 5th, 2015, 12:28am


Adrienne_Ray wrote on Oct 26th, 2015, 10:09pm:
In the spirit of Halloween, I thought we should look at the zombie condition. Walkers, zombies, whatever you choose to call them, every plot I can recall has the entire world infested with the undead with only a smattering of live humans left to save civilization. I have heard that if such a small amount of humans were left they would not be able to repopulate the world even if the undead were subdued.
But I have to ask, would the zombie contagion ever get this far?
zombies spread their disease by biting an uninfected human. If that is the only way it can be spread, small pox is much more contagious because it is airborn. So how is it we haven't been wiped out by small pox?
Walkers spread their disease by biting people. But in the Walking Dead, all humans also carry the disease for some other reason yet unexplained and will become a walker if they die for any reason. I suspect we will find out that the walkers' disease will turn out to be a biological weapon that got out of control because a disease like that, if it occurred naturally would not have spread like it does.
In Night of the Living Dead, it was spread by an asteroid. So it was spread over a large area. Even at that, in the original movie it looked like the humans were going to be victorious.
What say you, readers of anotherealm, would zombies take over the world? Or would we quickly figure out what was causing the problem and quarantine the walkers before they got out of control?


Your points are well taken as to how it spreads. Perhaps an answer might be that it is indeed an airborne infection but that it can be fought off by a healthy immune system. Of course if you die, there goes the immune system. If you get bitten the sudden surge of infection overwhelms the immune system resulting in death and then the inevitable infection or re-incarnation as a zombie.

But that doesn't explain why scavenging animals don't turn into zombies as well. The only explaination for that would be a custom tailored DNA aware cocktail which only targets humans. Which goes right into the bio-warfare conspiracy theory. But! why would you try to turn an enemy army into zombies? That would be worse than actually fighting them in the first place.

But that idea makes some kind of sense as natural infections tend to mutate into less or more lethal versions. Avian flu might be a good example of this in action. So if it didn't mutate that might indicate it was in fact man made. Which leads to the idea of bio-warfare gone bad. A secret black ops bio-weapon escapes from a (Insert villain of choice here) top secret lab and dooms humanity.  

Of course this doesn't really explain the method the infection uses to re-animate the dead. Apparently the brain must be undamaged. Seeing as muscles can be activated by electrical impulses a theory might be that the infection causes a primitive electrical generation in the brain that is self sustaining and semi-intelligent. But that sounds more like a symbioses than an infection.

Cue the extra-terrestrial bio-infection a-la "Andromeda Strain". But that mutated as well eventually becoming harmless.

No matter how you look at it the idea of zombies doesn't seem possible scientifically... But! Then again. What kind of story would that make?

Anotherealm Forum Powered by YaBB 2.2.2!
Anotherealm © 1995-2015. All Rights Reserved.

The comments on this forum are owned by whomever posted them.
We are not responsible for them in any way.