An Overview of Zombies: Epidemiology of Fear

This article aimed to rationale how science fiction content describe and illustrate human culture through zombies. There was no formal concept of probability in Europe prior to the mid-17th century [3], despite the idea of randomized objects was already commonly seen. Asides from the first textbook of probability by Huygens in 1657, it was not until the 19th century, that works carrying attributes of epidemiological research came into spotlight.

Numerous disciplines, such as demography, biology, sociology, and political economy, are similar to epidemiology - they all rely on the concept of population and its derived data to determine the potential outcome. What differentiates epidemiology from others, is the combination of group comparison and population thinking as a mean to identify the common denominator of regarding the population health, most notably, John Snow’s investigations of the 1854 epidemic of cholera in London and the outbreak around the Broad Street pump [7]. After two centuries of development and refinement, the methods and concepts that be- come the corner stone of group comparison lead to the emergence of epidemiology. The absence of theoretical background set early-epidemiology and modern epidemiology parts, it took years to identify sources of illegitimate interpretations of group comparisons that were affected by confounding factors [9], a concept unfamiliar to the 19th century predecessors.

After establishing confounding as an non-comparability issue, in collaboration with statis- ticians pushed early epidemiologists to methodologically deal with it in a wide variety of scenarios [4]. These solutions safe guard and guaranteed the rapid growth of epidemiology after World War II, leading to the modern epidemiology we now knows. Zombie represents a relentlessly aggressive reanimated corpse driven by a biologic infec- tion [8]. Across all the discovered diseases, descriptions of zombies date back to the 1500s [1], and the English word zombie was first recorded in 1819 [5]. Though the word withstands a rather long historical significance, known cases of zombies with Homo sapiens origin are rare, only few scientifically documented medical records to prove their existence [1].

When authors absorb and reanimate narratives from real life epidemiological outbreak, these narratives are called ”outbreak narratives” [6]. They are often flooded with rhetoric of fear portrayed in the media nowadays [2], to associate the fictional content with actual pandemics, labeling zombies as a pandemic avatar. The invisible pathogen is often the manifestation of the unknown intimate contact, be- yond the detection ability of our senses. Interestingly, zombie infection symptoms tend to be consistent, regardless of the carrier, but the incubation period varies widely from different literatures, with time to development of symptoms ranging from seconds to days. The zombie as allegory of disease epidemiology.

Conclusion

”I think zombies reflect our very real anxieties of these crazy scary times. A zombie story gives people a fictional lens to see the real problems of the world. You can deal with societal breakdown, famine, disease, chaos in the streets, but as long as the catalyst for all of them is zombies, you can still sleep.” (Max Brooks)