So Zombies aren't real...? Part 2

Washington

6/01/2012 @ 6:36PM |55,091 views

Zombie Cannibal Apocalypse- CDC Weighs In, But Is ABC's Castle to Blame?

Zombie Pandemic Imagery, courtesy of the CDC http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies/#/page/1

As of late Friday there were nearly 1,000 news stories about cannibals featured on Google News.  Stories about zombies were also starting to catch on, mostly tied to the tragic and sad story of an attack on a homeless man in Miami that left the man faceless. Gawker weighed in on the story with a piece aptly entitled “Could People Please Stop Eating Other People’s Body Parts?”  Some have speculated that the cannibalism (zombieism?) is being caused by a virus, others like Forbes contributor Alice Walton have attributed it to synthetic drugs.  In fact, cannibal stories have popped up not only in Miami, but other related stories with zombie/cannibal overtones have cropped up around the world including:

• A story in Maryland where a man has been charged with killing a man and eating his brain’s and heart.
• A story in Canada about a porn star turned murderer and cannibal who is currently on the run from police.
• A story in Sweden where a man is alleged to have cut off his wife’s lips and eaten them. And a separate story where a woman is alleged to have bitten her boyfriend’s penis.
• A story in New York where a man chewed the ear off of of another man at a Staten Island restaurant.
• A story in New Jersey where a man stabbed himself repeatedly in front of police and then threw his skin and intestines at them.

That may look like a trend, but Scott Talan, a professor of public communication tells CNN:

Fact is, horrible crimes happen all the time.  “This is all nothing new,” said Scott Talan, professor of public communication at American University, with a long work history in public relations and the media.  Bad news attracts attention, he said, and when it happens in bunches, people like to attach a name to it, hence, “zombie apocalypse.”

Maybe.  But, for those who are worried about the Zombie Apocalypse, fear not, the CDC has weighed in with a Zombie Preparedness webpage.  Granted, they told The Huffington Post that there is no such thing as a zombie virus, stating “[The] CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms).”  But would they tell us if they did?  Governments have a record of keeping these types of thing secret as Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism pointed out in a blog post at The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology:

…in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax letters, when the US Postal Service (USPS) and the CDC, knowing the Brentwood postal facility in Washington, DC, was contaminated, waited four days before closing the facility and giving antibiotics to workers. By that time, one worker had already died of inhalational anthrax, another was hours from death, and two more were gravely ill. In another telling incident, for six weeks the government of China denied its 2003 SARS epidemic, causing international alarm and a preventable spread of the disease.

So maybe it’s a secret government plot, my guess is that it’s a news trend kicked off by the television show Castle.  After all, it was late April when Castle and Beckett solved the case of a man beaten to death and partly eaten by a zombie.  In the episode, the man was actually high on a synthetic drug and didn’t remember attacking the victim.  But, in the show (which aired before the crime in Miami) surveillance cameras caught part of the action, just like in Miami.  You can watch the full episode here — it’s the type of story that headlines are ripped from.

Gregory S. McNeal is a professor who specializes in law, public policy, national security & crime.  You can follow him on Twitter @GregoryMcNeal.