Washington, DC — In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention jumped on the recent explosion of zombies in popular culture by launching a page dedicated to ‘zombie preparedness’, admitting that their tongue-in-cheek campaign, designed to engage new audiences in preparation for natural disasters, had become an effective platform for promoting hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, and terrorist attack awareness.
Few could have expected that their irreverent humor might have some basis in reality.
During the government shutdown, an unnamed source from the Department of Health and Human Services leaked a highly confidential report detailing an incident wherein the bodies of the recently deceased appeared to reanimate and began to attack citizens of a small town on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
Messages left at the CDC offices in Georgia were not immediately returned.
This past Thursday morning, Fox News medical contributor Dr. Manny Alvarez wrote that shows such as The Walking Dead are dumbing down American society. He muses that such shows “inspire fantasies of monsters possessed by an uncontrollable rage to kill, and viewers get a thrill imagining what it would be like to participate in this new world order.”
As it turns out, those engaging themselves in such fantasies may have enough common sense to validate their thrill-seeking attitude.
In October of 2004, reports of people described as listless, pale, and partially decomposed emerged from Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. The incursion appears to have taken place during a marching band competition at Thomas Massey High School. Though the document, termed the Undeath Syndrome Surveillance and Diagnosis report, details an incursion that swept the Delaware County area, no local or national news stations can corroborate the account.
However, details emerging from the report go so far as to describe the medical condition of the ‘undead’ while providing a primer for the expected reanimation time of those attacked and bitten by those referred to as ‘specimens’. The report also features a section called the ‘Specimen Brain Trauma Impact Index’, which details the most effective method of eliminating those afflicted by Undeath Syndrome.
As if the report couldn’t be more terrifying, there is a precedent available elsewhere.
In 2005, a BBC News story which has since been removed from the site (but has been archived here), recounted recently deceased Quan’sul residents returning to life as a result of a new strain of Malaria. Apparently, the Cambodian government quietly dealt with the matter, and no further stories surfaced.
The concept that the recent dead could return to life isn’t an old one, and though it may have received popular credence thanks to The Walking Dead and World War Z, the revelations of this CDC report are too potent to ignore.
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