Zombie Outbreak Pandemonium

Another part of my extended public service zombie outbreak awareness series. Be sure to study my entire collection so you can pass the written test which I will add here later.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas unless it’s viral.

     September is National Preparedness Month in the US and is this a coincidence? You may have noticed other preparedness campaigns about this time every year (September �" October); flu shots, vaccinations, FEMA, the Department of Defense, the TSA, and tons of other agencies and social services. It seems that everybody is getting ready for something right around this same time every year. What are they getting ready for? Why is this time of year so critical? No, it’s not just election season and Occupy Wall Street 1% time and it’s not just Halloween time either. It’s also outbreak season.

 

     Federal, state, and local municipalities are making sure that when something pandemic happens, they will be able to provide a response and maintain some form of limited government. Keep your eyes open each year as we get closer to the fall in the US and you'll see a nice ramping up of public service adds hoping this will keep us just a little safer. Oh, by the way, outbreak season is the spring and summer in the southern hemisphere, so you may want to pay attention to outbreak stories on a global level. You do know the US is not the only country on the planet, right?  

     Go online today and look for outbreak and preparedness information at the CDC and WHO websites. There are too many outbreak stories to list them all here, from SARS to hantavirus to meningitis to West Nile�"make sure you review stories from around the world. There’s no excuse for you not to know. You can even access the information on your cell phones, so stop looking at kittens playing piano on YouTube and actually pay attention to something that can save your life.

     October to February each year is prime time for viral outbreaks. Why? Colder weather pushes people to spend more time indoors and huddled closer together. Kids are back in school. This makes it easier for flues and colds and other nasty germs to get around. By the way, you should know that the timing of winter is reversed for the southern hemisphere, so for people in Australia and Chile, outbreaks are more likely to happen between May and August. What happens in the southern hemisphere countries in May and June is a good gauge of what we can expect in the northern hemisphere for our winters.

So what? We have cold and flu outbreaks every year. What’s the big deal?

     Texas A&M studies of natural outbreak patterns and models showed a Z-virus outbreak (zombies) is most likely to start in the southern hemisphere. Pick up your cell phone, stop the kitten video, and do a web search for African ebola outbreaks and 1918 Spanish Flu. Z-virus shows the greatest potential for an outbreak when it piggy-backs off another viral outbreak�"even greater potential if it piggy-backs off of several crippling outbreaks�"notwithstanding synthetic Z-virus outbreaks caused by terrorists or rogue countries (more about this later).

     If there is a pandemic outbreak similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu where globally millions of people are sick and dying, you can expect medical and body disposal services to become overwhelmed. Remember, stage 1 Z-virus is naturally occurring and lies dormant inside a small number of human hosts until that host dies. Once a number of these people die from a pandemic outbreak of something like Swine Flu or SARS and a number of those bodies go undisposed, this is the potential ground zero for a pandemic Z-virus outbreak (stage 2 Z-virus)...also known as Z-Day.

     Prevention is the best cure. Get your flu shots (free in a lot of places), wash your hands often, stay the hell away from sick people especially if you travel, and watch out for kids. Kids are the germiest, nastiest, cesspool petridishes of viral outbreak potential and almost everyone has them or knows some�"they don’t wash their filthy little hands, they put crazy things in their mouths all the time, and they touch everything. People with kids will be the first and fastest to fall from any kind of pandemic outbreak.

     Containment is the next best cure. The CDC and the WHO track global outbreaks and have emergency response teams to assist with everything from treatments to vaccinations to body disposal. They also have their own zombie eradication squads. Fact: the CDC can authorize a full military response for outbreaks worldwide with only a phone call to the White House. A fully loaded military response to an outbreak isn’t landing to help pass out lozenges and Kleenex.

     I myself was a squad leader for US Marine Corps teams responding to an outbreak in western Iran, but because of diplomatic problems, we have to say it was eastern Iraq. I’ll share more about that later. Things like this never make the news and tend to have a 20-year secrecy classification. Lucky for you all my time on that response team was back in 1991, so I’ll tell you everything I know, later. Google zombie response teams, zombie outbreaks in US history and also look up zombie response Gulf War and zombie response WWII.

     So the world is going to end up in the crapper one day because of a zombie outbreak. What can you expect? What should you be doing now? What are the keys to your survival in a full blown zombie pandemonium? We’ll get into this more next time.

Author's Note

Do you know a good zombie myth? Have a zombie question? Ask me, the zombie expert! Ask me what I think about anything zombie related. Challenge me on anything I write. I'll get back to you fast. I want you to survive. I want you to be a part of the zombie outbreak solution and not a part of the zombie outbreak problem.