Are you my Mummy?
Leaving aside the zombie question, why do you think a disease that infects most of China becoming a global pandemic is unrealistic? Seems to me a pathogen that could successfully colonize a billion people could equally well spread to the rest of us. But IANA epidemiologist.
Is this one in production yet? The movie, I mean.
'Cause it sounds like a good one.
And that theory had been abandoned by the sequels. Romero was right when he decided he was better off not offering an explanation for the dead reason. And the zombie outbreak in the Living Dead series doesn’t really resemble a pandemic; the rules of nature simply change overnight and any fresh corpse with an intact brain reanimates.
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Leaving aside the zombie question, why do you think a disease that infects most of China becoming a global pandemic is unrealistic? Seems to me a pathogen that could successfully colonize a billion people could equally well spread to the rest of us. But IANA epidemiologist.
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Because, as with SARS, once it gets to a western nation it’s no longer going to be ignored or covered up…it’s certainly not going to spread completely out of control due to government cover-ups such as the Chinese and North Koreans regularly attempt to do in the real world. It’s going to be treated and quarantined, so I doubt it would spread as it does in the movies at that point. One of the key factors in WW-Z was that, after the Chinese lost control and started asking for help, western governments basically ignored it for a time because it was too fantastical…it was this inactivity and denial that was the final straw, especially when the military refused to believe and ended up getting overwhelmed in several key battles because they just wouldn’t believe what was happening. I think that’s where the break down is…I don’t think that governments (or the military) would bury their heads in the sand once things came out in the open, regardless of how ridiculous it would seem (i.e. zombies).
Still…as was my point in that post, it’s not completely ridiculous either that something like that could spread if given a foot hold such as in the book wrt China and North Korea.
IANA epidemiologist either, nor do I play one on the SDMB…nor have I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express lately, so grain of salt. 
I don’t get it…?
Pretty sure that was a Dr. Who reference? yes?
In Dawn Of The Dead it was still fairly early in the outbreak. A problem they had was that people had not adjusted to the widespread presence of undead, and wanted to have funerals and such instead of destroying the brain and burning them. In a TV interview (in the film) a scientist was trying to explain to people that the zombies were no longer their loved ones. If people don’t cooperate, the plague spreads.
Of course, destroying the brain doesn’t always work. 
Yes. “The Empty Child” episode.
Sure. But if a pathogen has infected 90% of the Chinese population, ignoring or covering it up is kinda irrelevant, isn’t it? I take your point that Western public health organizations will aggressively attempt to control and treat it, but with with a billion disease vectors, couldn’t it be simply too big to contain? So it seems to me, speaking ex cathedra from the seat of my pants.
Yep. Frylock’s explanation - which was a clever bit of fanwankery; nicely done, Fry - is pretty much the plot of the Doctor Who episodes “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances”. An alien ambulance crashes during the Blitz in London, and releases a cloud of nanites, who resurrect the body of a child killed by the crash. Since the little boy was wearing a gas mask at the time, the nanites think that it’s part of his body, and replace his face with the mask. He spends most of the episode following people around, asking “Are you my mummy?”.
It’s one of the best Doctor Who stories, and “Are you my mummy?” is something of a meme among Who fans.
Damn. Ninja’d by a pissed-off lagomorph.
In iZombie (the TV show - not sure how closely it follows the comic book), Zombies still have their body parts and can eat normal food. But they get uncontrollable cravings for human brains.
But at the moment they are not huge in numbers.
Brian
“You mean… the movie LIED???”
:smack: I thought I was going to just before that line, but I was under time and volume constraints when I posted and missed it by over a minute!
THERE’S something you don’t hear every day.
Skipper - “That’s Hollywood for you. Any fool knows that wolfsbane is only used against werewolves.”
Mary Ann - “But it was a very good picture.”
Skipper - “Well, maybe so, but a glaring mistake like that makes the whole picture unbelievable.”
Oh! I’ve seen that, actually!
90% sure I came up with the zombie fanwank years before seeing that episode, but maybe not–maybe I totally stole it.
Then they should be in boxes. Okay, how about shipping crates? Hmm…
Yep, I understand that, but my thinking is that would it take months or years even.
My problem here is that at what point is a bitten human a zombie? The walking dead tv show is probably the worst about this, they routinely show partial remains, even just a head, still being animated, yet also show 3/4 of a corpse or more being eaten.
That’s probably the best explanation, that the zombies are just trying to make more zombies rather than feed.
Throw something else into the mix: In the original novel “I am Legend,” which is considered the godfather of modern zombie apocalyptic fiction, the infected did eat each other, and there was a difference between reanimated dead and living infected.
I refuse to believe that zombies play dice.
Carnivorous plants do not have intestines. The victim rots away to yummy stuff in the trap.
Just sayin’.
In a Southpark episode, zombies were created when a mortician dribbled his worchestershire (sp) sauce into his embalming fluid.
