Zombie Warfare Preparation: A Cure for the Zombie Virus?

We’ve done everything we could. Now, it’s a bullet to the head.

At least that’s where we are now. In the event of a zombie apocalypse, we need to understand what all of our options are. First off, there’s a lot we know and there’s a lot we don’t know. What we’ve come to realize is that people are turning into zombies. Depending upon the mythology or storyline you’re following, we can say that a zombie bite will either cause someone’s death or cause someone to die and become a zombie.

This almost sounds like that same things. But, if we look at the way things happen on television shows like The Walking Dead, we know that the condition that causes people to become zombies happens after death, whether that death is caused by a zombie attack or not. The logical conclusion is that there is something within our environment that causes a metamorphosis not dissimilar to that of a caterpillar to a butterfly. A person spends part of their existence as a living breathing human being up until their heart stops. Then some kind of biochemical reaction happens which is kept at bay through the bio-electrical phenomena of human life and once that spark is taken away and brain death occurs the organism becomes a violent automation that spreads a lethal venom through its mouth.

So we go from life to death to pseudo-life to fertilizer.

In that scenario, it may seem like it’s a hopeless case. This has happened because something in our bodies has been saturated with a chemical agent, radioactive exposure, or biological mutation that starts when we stop. All we know is that it requires an uninjured brain. Once the brain stem is destroyed (as the zombies are operating from the reptile brain) the organism stops operating. It is not alive. All the parts that would make it live (while it was alive) do not function. The heart, lungs, liver, and other major organs do not function. The brain stem seems to be using something akin to the sympathetic nervous system to do all its work.

The above physiological changes also occur in what I call World War Z or The Zombie Survival Guide type of zombies as defined by Max Brooks. The only major difference is that these zombies become zombies through the contagion of another zombie.

The virus, as Brooks calls it “Solanum” works through infection, kills the host, reconfigures the human body, and brings it back to pseudo life. The blood turns into a brown red muck chemical and does nothing as there is no beating heart to push the chemicals in the body. The body operates through an anaerobic process.

According to Brooks, there is no cure for Solanum. Taken orally, it is toxic – but will fail to turn the organism into a zombie. From what we understand, it is 100% communicable and, obviously, fatal. Infection occurs through open wounds or through injection of the virus.

We are relatively sure the problem is viral. Unfortunately, the very nature of the virus is to kill cells and transmogrify the brain. As the virus is a communicable certainty and apparently only contagious to human beings (you’ll notice that there are no zombie animals). Testing now becomes somewhat problematic as the risk of not only death but reanimation is extraordinarily high. Such testing would need to occur with volunteers.

The typical way of fighting a virus is through antibiotics – which once again will not work unless there is a radical change within the subjects immunity processes. This being said, it will require the work of genetic engineers to create a more aggressive form of antibodies prior to the introduction of the Solanum vaccine.

Scientists should consider subjects from the prison populations and offer sentence reductions while having the luxury of observing the subjects for adverse side effects as well as failed inoculations. While there is a risk that some criminal element will be released upon the public prematurely – this risk is outweighed by the problems of wholesale looting that will happen should a zombie apocalypse in its worst case scenario materialize.

There’s a lot we don’t know.

A zombie infestation begins with one zombie. That poor unfortunate soul has contracted a disease that, at this point, has no known origin. The war we must wage in biochemistry has too many variables. The Solanum virus could have come from the concentrated ingestion of bacon and pork products and could also just as easily have come by the accumulated radiation we get from our television sets.

We just don’t know enough. There are no tricks we can use. There is no propaganda we can give. This problem is not from any kind of animal rabies but it will affect us just the same, if not worse.

The threat of a zombie contagion is a bit frightening. We know that there is a need to fight it and perhaps save some of our loved ones should they be bitten in a melee with one of the undead. While there is a promise of some chances in genetic engineering research and an antiviral program that will require a thinning of our criminal population, we remain optimistic. Until then, we have a large supply of bullets and any gun will create an immediate and permanent cure.