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BBC said:Science ponders 'zombie attack'
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
There has been a revival of the zombie in recent years
With zombies actually existing, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.
That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.
They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the creatures.
The scientific paper is published in a book - Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress.
In books, films, video games and folklore, zombies are undead creatures, able to turn the living into other zombies with a bite.
But there is a serious side to the work.
In some respects, a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal, rapidly spreading infection. The researchers say the exercise could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations.
My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever
Professor Neil Ferguson
In their study, the researchers from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University (also in Ottawa) posed a question: If there was to be a battle between zombies and the living, who would win?
Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake) and colleagues wrote: "We model a zombie attack using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies and historical research.
"We introduce a basic model for zombie infection and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions."
On his university web page, the mathematics professor at Ottawa University says the question mark distinguishes him from Robert Smith, lead singer of rock band The Cure.
To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films.
"While we are trying to be as broad as possible in modelling zombies - especially as there are many variables - we have decided not to consider these individuals," the researchers said.
Even so, their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.
In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".
They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."
According to the researchers, the key difference between the zombies and the spread of other real infections is that "zombies can come back to life".
Professor Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK government's chief advisors on controlling the spread of swine flu, said the study did have parallels with some infectious diseases.
"None of them actually cause large-scale death or disease, but certainly there are some fungal infections which are difficult to eradicate," said Professor Ferguson, from Imperial College London.
"There are some viral infections - simple diseases like chicken pox have survived in very small communities. If you get it when you are very young, the virus stays with you and can re-occur as shingles, triggering a new chicken pox epidemic."
Professor Smith? told BBC News: "When you try to model an unfamiliar disease, you try to find out what's happening, try to approximate it. You then refine it, go back and try again."
"We refined the model again and again to say... here's how you would tackle an unfamiliar disease."
Professor Ferguson joked: "The paper considers something that many of us have worried about - particularly in our younger days - of what would be a feasible way of tackling an outbreak of a rapidly spreading zombie infection.
"My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever. So perhaps they are being a little over-pessimistic when they conclude that zombies might take over a city in three or four days," he said.
Zombies: the only pandemic that can really get us
India Lenon asks whether Canadian mathematicians have hit on the one true threat to mankind.
By India Lenon
Published: 2:09PM BST 19 Aug 2009
Rampaging zombies in the film Dawn of the Dead Photo: Reuters
Yesterday, the end of the human race was predicted (for those that credit the existence of zombies, at any rate).
Mathematicians from the University of Ottawa, using models designed to determine the effect of pandemic diseases, have calculated in their study “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection” that resistance would be futile, and that unless the rise of the undead was dealt with quickly, we would all be “in a great deal of trouble”.
One of the students involved said, “In the short term, it's very hard to wipe out zombies. You might get lucky and have a cricket bat and knock one zombie’s head off, but there are thousands more coming.”
The idea of the zombie is believed to have originated in African voodoo traditions, but it was the case of the family in Haiti who in 1937 claimed that their relative, Felicia Felix-Mentor, had returned despite her death and burial thirty years earlier, that really inspired the subsequent explosion of the idea among horror fans.
But the researchers in Canada have based their zombies not on the principle of unique incidences like Ms Felix-Mentor, but on the slow-moving, biting variety of zombie featured in the film ‘Dawn of the Dead’, which travels around with a sizeable, groaning mob, expanding its numbers with unwitting victims.
Zombie-ism has now effectively been placed in the same category as Swine Flu, whereby the population is divided into those that have it, and those that don’t and are desperately trying to avoid those that do. And the solutions the mathematicians came up with were either “aggressive quarantine” or decapitation - an interesting solution should supplies of Tamiflu run low.
Many will be sceptical about this study, especially given that it was conducted by one professor and three (and here I speculate) extremely geeky students, whose ‘research’ consisted mainly of watching zombie films and playing video games.
But there are, perhaps, signs that we should be concerned. The frequent showings of the ‘Thriller’ video amongst the Michael Jackson tributes of the last few weeks have ensured that zombies have received extensive air time, doubtless raising their confidence. And there are several MPs who, post-expenses revelations, could well be described as ‘dead men walking’.
