R Nought: Population Dynamics and the Zombie Apocalypse, part 1
One of the great things about the methodologies developed in mathematics and science is that they can often be adapted to analyze questions that they were not originally designed to answer, and sometimes even questions that are based on events that have never happened and could never happen. Once an idea is born, it can take on a life of its own, and find its way into some very unusual places. In this spirit, I will attempt to analyze the stability of a human-zombie relationship, based on the principles of population dynamics.
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Chapter 1 Seksek:
It started with a rumor. A mysterious disease was killing people in remote villages in Papua New Guinea. It was incredibly virulent. An anthropologist, Dr. Lete, who had been studying one of these remote tribes returned to a village after being absent for only two months, and found every single resident, nearly 200 people, dead. Worst of all was how they had died. At first, he had thought that wild animals had tried to eat them after they died from disease, but a second glance revealed a much more grisly reality. They had tried to eat each other. Dr. Lete knew that it was not uncommon for New Guinean natives to eat their dead, but some of them had clearly been alive when they were consumed. He was baffled, and very alarmed. He returned to France to tell the authorities of his discovery, and to help investigate what exactly had happened to these villagers.
Unfortunately, the incident was not isolated. Within months of Dr. Lete's report, other gruesome tales of cannibalism started to reach larger cities in Southeast Asia. They seemed to be centered around New Guinea, but they were no longer limited to remote villages. Reports of attacks in and around Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, were substantiated by local law enforcement. According to official reports, one of the victims of an attempted attack later attacked her doctor, killing him, before dying herself from a mysterious disease.
After the Moresby attacks, the media began calling the poor victims, "zombies," a name which stuck, despite its inaccuracy. The victims were not "undead," but the way in which the disease apparently spread, through bites from infected individuals, was sufficiently creepy to merit the name. Three months after the initial report, five cases had been confirmed in Indonesia and one in Australia. Worst of all was that the scientific community was at a loss to explain it. It did not seem to be caused by any known virus or bacteria, in fact, epidemiologists had ruled out the presence of a bacterium, and were also fairly certain that it was not caused by a virus.
An expert on Creutzfeldt-Jakob (Mad Cow) from England, Dr. Spelter, suggested that it might be a form of spongiform encephalopathy caused by a prion disorder. Prion disorders are rare diseases caused by the misfolding of proteins. These rogue proteins interact with similar proteins causing them to misfold in the same way. While not unheard of, prion disorders tend not to spread easily. Creutzfield-Jakob is spread by the consumption of infected beef. Kuru, another spongiform encephalopathy, is spread by the consumption of human flesh, and was endemic among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea who practiced funerary cannibalism until the 1970s. After receiving a biopsy of infected brain tissue, Dr. Spelter was able to confirm that the disease, called Seksek by the native Guineans, was caused by a prion.
After Dr. Spelter's discovery, I was called-in to help the CDC develop a strategy to deal with the epidemic. I am not, as you know, an epidemiologist, per se, my specialty is parasitoid wasps, but John Gruber, a friend of mine from college, was on the working group investigating Seksek, and thought that my experience in modeling wasp and caterpillar populations could be applied to understand the relationship between infected and uninfected individuals.
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Ok, so that's the first chapter of a story I have had in my head for a while. It's actually based on a study guide I wrote for a class, population dynamics, taught by Evan Cooch at Cornell University. This first chapter was mostly background. I haven't really developed any characters yet, but I want to know whether you (my readers, presumably) think it is worth continuing. I am not a highly motivated writer (:cough: G.R.R. Martin :cough:), and I need some external nudging to keep it up.
P.S. The choice of names is entirely haphazard, and any similarity to real people is coincidental. I was surprised to find that a guy named John Gruber came up with MarkDown, a markdown language I use for writing notes and R documentation. I kept it, because I thought I should honor someone who made something so awesome.