You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [86]
This bug infects rats but can only breed inside the intestines of a cat. Knowing that it needs to get the rat inside the cat, the parasite takes over the rat’s brain and makes it scurry toward the cats. The rat is being programmed to get itself eaten, and it doesn’t even know it.
Of course, those are just rats, right?
How it can result in zombies
Hey, did we mention that half the humans on earth are infected with toxoplasmosis and don’t know it? Maybe you’re one of them. Flip a coin.
If your coin just landed braaaains-side up, you should know that studies have shown that the infected will often see a change in their personality and are more likely to go insane.
Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse
Humans and rats aren’t all that different. It’s why we use them to test our medications. All it would take to cause a zombie apocalypse is a more evolved version of toxoplasma that could do to us what it does to the rats. So imagine if half the world suddenly had no instinct for self-preservation or rational thought. Even less than they do now, we mean.
If you’re comforting yourself with the thought that it may take forever for such a parasite to evolve, you’re forgetting about all the biological weapons programs around the world busy weaponizing such bugs. You’ve got to wonder if those lab workers don’t carry out their work under the unwitting command of the Toxoplasma gondii already in their brains. If you don’t want to sleep at night, that is.
Granted, these people have never been dead and thus don’t fit the exact definition of zombies, but we can assure you that the distinction won’t matter a whole lot once the groaning hordes are clawing at your windows.
4. NEUROTOXINS
What are they?
There are certain kinds of poisons that slow your bodily functions to the point that you’ll be considered dead, even to a doctor. The poison from Japanese blowfish can do this.
The victims can then be brought back under the effects of a drug like stramonium (or other chemicals called alkaloids) that leave them in a trancelike state with no memory but still able to perform simple tasks like eating, sleeping, moaning, and shambling around with their arms outstretched.
How it can result in zombies
Can? How about does.
This has already happened in Haiti, where the word zombie comes from. Just ask Clairvius Narcisse. He was declared dead by two doctors and buried in 1962. They found him wandering around the village eighteen years later. It turned out the local voodoo priests had been using alkaloid-like chemicals found in jimsonweed (or as it’s known in Haiti, zombie’s cucumber) to zombify people and put them to work on the sugar plantations.
So the next time you’re pouring a little packet of sugar into your coffee, remember that it may have been handled by a zombie at some point.
Chances this could cause a zombie apocalypse
On the one hand, it’s already happened, so that earns it some street cred. But even if some evil genius intentionally distributed alkaloid toxins to a population to turn them into a shambling, mindless horde, there is no way to make these zombies aggressive or cannibalistic.
Yet.
3. THE REAL RAGE VIRUS
What is it?
In the movie 28 Days Later, it was a virus that turned human beings into mindless killing machines. In real life, we have a series of brain disorders that do the same thing. They were never contagious, of course. Then mad cow disease came along. It attacks the cow’s brain, turning it into a stumbling, mindless attack cow.
And when humans eat the meat . . .
How it can result in zombies
When humans are infected with mad cow, they call it Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Check out the symptoms:
• Changes in gait
• Lack of coordination (stumbling and falling)
• Muscle twitching
• Myoclonic jerks or seizures
• Rapidly developing delirium or dementia
The sanest guy in the office.
Sure, the disease is rare and the afflicted aren’t known