Zombie CSU (30 page)

Which means a zombie is not going to get up and walk out of the morgue, as is so often seen in films.

Smith adds, “If the CDC
¹⁶
is monitoring something special (bird flu for instance) and we encounter cases with the disease, we would let them know for tracking purposes, as well as the public health nurse. Something like a plague incident does not fly under the radar.”

J
UST THE
F
ACTS

The Zombie Infection

To anyone in the health field, the word
epidemic
is guaranteed to send chills up the spine. Nothing paints a more terrifying picture than an invisible army of disease germs that spreads like wildfire.

The correct term for something like this is
pandemic,
¹⁷
which is defined by the World Health Organization
¹⁸
as the emergence of a disease new to the population in which the agent infects humans, causing serious illness; and in which the agent spreads easily and sustainably among humans.

There are plenty of diseases that kill hundreds of thousands or even millions and which are not considered pandemics, cancer among them. For a disease to be a pandemic, it must be infectious or contagious. Fighting communicable diseases is tough at the best of times.

The World Health Organization classifies diseases of this kind as follows:

Interpandemic period:

 


Phase 1: No new influenza virus subtypes have been detected in humans.


 


 


Phase 2: No new influenza virus subtypes have been detected in humans, but an animal variant threatens human disease.


 

Pandemic alert period:

 


Phase 3: Human infection(s) with a new subtype but no human-to-human spread.


 


 


Phase 4: Small cluster(s) with limited localized human-to-human transmission.


 


 


Phase 5: Larger cluster(s) but human-to-human spread still localized.


 

Pandemic period:

 


Phase 6: Increased and sustained transmission in general population.


 

History is filled with accounts of plagues whose destructive force is truly hard to grasp. The Black Death of the fourteenth century killed seventy-five million people worldwide, including two-thirds of Europe’s population! Two hundred years later the disease returned as the Italian Plague of 1629–1631, killing 280,000 people and then spread from country to country, becoming the Great Plague of Seville (1647–1652), killing 60,000 people (25 percent of Sevilla’s population); then the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), which killed nearly 100,000; the Great Plague of Vienna (1679) in which 76,000 died; the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–1722, which killed another 100,000; before moving onto Moscow in 1771 and slaughtering 200,000 more. And that’s just the bubonic plague.
¹⁹

Aside from Black Plague, there have been a number of major epidemics throughout history that have torn their way through whole cultures. During the Peloponnesian War (430
B.C.E
.), typhoid fever killed a quarter of all the Athenian troops, and roughly the same percentage of the overall population of Athens during a four-year period. Typhoid fever is an incredibly virulent disease that often kills its host so quickly that they don’t live long enough to spread the disease, so in a sense the strength of the disease probably kept it from wiping out all of Greece…and maybe all of that part of the world. Talk about cold comfort.

The Plague of Galen (165–180
C.E
.
²⁰
) also known as the Anto-nine Plague, scythed its way through the Roman Empire. There is some doubt as to whether the disease at the heart of the epidemic was measles or smallpox, but what’s not in doubt is that it cut down nearly five million citizens of the Empire, including a couple of emperors, Lucius Verus
²¹
(130–169
C.E
.) and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180
C.E
.). At the height of this plague, two thousand people a day were dying in Rome, according to the historian Dio Cassius.

The first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague was the Plague of Justinian, which lasted from 541 to 750. The outbreak began in Egypt and swept into Constantinople like a tsunami, killing ten thousand people a day. The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that this plague killed close to half of the population of the known world. Sit with that thought for a minute.

Cholera, another killer disease, has racked up seven pandemics so far, with a body count in the tens of millions. The first of these plagues began in Bengal in 1816 and spread outward from there, reaching China and the Caspian Sea before it slackened its lethal pace in 1826. But three years later it was back, striking Europe in 1829 and then leaping across the Atlantic to America in 1834, until it again slowed in 1851. It struck in Russia between 1852 and 1860, killing over a million people; then three years later it hit Africa. North America took another hit in 1866; and a sixth wave hit Germany in 1892. In 1899 it struck Europe again, but now science had begun to catch up to the needs of the suffering population, this time the disease did relatively little damage. However, when you speak of a disease like cholera, “relatively little” still doesn’t equate to a cheery outcome. For decades the disease seemed to be in retreat and then it hit Indonesia in 1961, then shot through Bangladesh, and back to Russia. Every time health experts think the disease is gone, it rears its ugly head again.