Taken from a book entitled "You Might Be A Zombi And Other Bad Things" - by Nathan Birch
"Five scientific reasons why a Zombi Apolalypse could actually happen.
1. Brain Parasites - Parasites that turn victims into mindless, zombielike servants are fairly common in nature. There’s one called Toxoplasma gondii that seems to devote its entire existence to being terrifying.
If you’re comforting yourself with the thought that it may take forever for such a parasite to evolve, you’re forgetting about all the biological weapons programs around the world busy weaponizing such bugs. You’ve got to wonder if those lab workers don’t carry out their work under the unwitting command of the Toxoplasma gondii already in their brains. If you don’t want to sleep at night, that is.
2. Neurotoxins - There are certain kinds of poisons that slow your bodily functions to the point that you’ll be considered dead, even to a doctor. The poison from Japanese blowfish can do this.
The victims can then be brought back under the effects of a drug like stramonium (or other chemicals called alkaloids) that leave them in a trancelike state with no memory but still able to perform simple tasks like eating, sleeping, moaning, and shambling around with their arms outstretched.
On the one hand, it’s already happened, so that earns it some street cred. But even if some evil genius intentionally distributed alkaloid toxins to a population to turn them into a shambling, mindless horde, there is no way to make these zombies aggressive or cannibalistic.
Yet.
3. The Real Rage Virus - When humans are infected with mad cow, they call it Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Check out the symptoms:
• Changes in gait
• Lack of coordination (stumbling and falling)
• Muscle twitching
• Myoclonic jerks or seizures
• Rapidly developing delirium or dementia
Sure, the disease is rare and the afflicted aren’t known to chase after people in murderous mobs. But it proves widespread brain infections of the rage variety are just a matter of waiting for the right disease to come along.
If the whole sudden, mindless violence idea seems far-fetched, remember that you are just one brain chemical (serotonin) away from turning into a mindless killing machine. All it would take is a disease that destroys the brain’s ability to absorb that one chemical, and suddenly it’s a real-world 28 Days Later.
So imagine such an evolved disease, which we’ll call super mad cow, getting a foothold through the food supply. Say this disease spreads through blood-on-blood contact, or saliva-on-blood contact. Now you have a rage-type virus that can be transmitted with a bite.
With one bite, you’re suddenly the worst kind of zombie: a fast zombie.
4. Neurogenesis - You know all the controversy out there about stem cell research? Well, the whole thing with stem cells is that they’re basically used to regenerate dead cells. Particularly of interest to zombologists is neurogenesis, the method by which stem cells are used to regrow dead brain tissue.
So you take a brain-dead patient, use the techniques of Neurogenesis to regrow the brain stem, and you now have a mindless body shambling around, no thoughts and no personality, nothing but a cloud of base instincts and impulses. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we like to call a real, live, undead zombie.
5. Nanobots - A technology that science engineered to make you terrified of the future. We’re talking about microscopic, self-replicating robots that can invisibly build—or destroy—anything. Sure, at some level scientists know nanobots will destroy mankind. They just can’t resist seeing how it happens.
Scientists have already created a one-cell nanocyborg, by fusing a tiny silicone chip to a virus. The first thing they found out is that these cyborgs can still operate for up to a month after the death of the host. Notice how nanoscientists went right for zombification, even at this early stage.
According to studies, within a decade they’ll have nanobots that can crawl inside your brain and set up neural connections to replace damaged ones. That’s right; the nanobots will be able to rewire your thoughts. What could go wrong?
Do the math, people.
Someday there will be nanobots in your brain. Those nanobots will be programmed to keep functioning after you die. They can form their own neural pathways and use your brain to keep operating your limbs after you’ve deceased and, presumably, right up until you rot to pieces in midstride.
Of course, when that happens the nanobots would just need to transfer to a new host. Therefore, the last act of the nanobot zombie would be to bite a hole in a healthy victim, letting the nanobots stream in and set up camp in the new host. Once in, they can shut down the part of the brain that resists (the cortex) and leave the brain stem intact. They will have added a new member to the unholy army of the undead.
Look, we don’t want to create a panic here. All we’re saying is that on an actual day on the actual calendar in the future, runaway microscopic nanobots will end civilization by flooding the planet with the cannibalistic undead.
Science says so..."
