CDC Warns of Zombie Apocalypse

It must have seemed like a good joke at the time. That is, before Ebola got here. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “Public Health Matters” blog posted a guide entitled "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse." Assistant Surgeon General and Rear Admiral Ali S. Khan, MD, MPH, wrote:

“There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.”

Yes, it’s real.
Yes, it’s serious - not about _zombies_ (DUH!) but about promoting preparedness as well the CDC should.
Yes, it’s funny - precisely because the humor/satire proved useful in promoting the message.
No, it’s not predictive of treason.

There’s a group at the CDC tasked with raising awareness about preparing for major serious disease outbreaks. For a long time they had promoted awareness of issues surrounding “bird flu”, HIV, hypotheticals and other pandemics of varying severity. Then they stumbled across the idea of preparing for the zombie apocalypse: what with a surge of zombie movies, “The Zombie Survival Handbook” & “World War Z” hitting bestseller status, “zombie apocalypse” being a generic catchphrase in serious prepping circles, etc they realized that playing up that angle would get the message out at a time few would take pandemic preparedness seriously. It worked, with a generous sense of humor thrown in.

Now we have Ebola on the loose, and a lot of people are more aware/prepared precisely because the CDC joked about the “zombie apocalypse”. Maybe not huge numbers, but a net positive influence.

Lighten up, people. It wasn’t treason in the making.

A lot of us who consider ourselves preppers to one degree or another have been using this analogy for some time. At the moment, however, it's a little tasteless, I'll have to admit. But it is a very good mental scenario for a wide variety of disasters, epidemic included. If it jogged a few people into preparing for emergencies, I'll swallow the tastelessness. (Especially since I've used the phrase myself).

The real point isn't undead corpses staggering around, it's self-reliance and the ability not to have to depend on the government for assistance in times of civil emergency. Given how the government has responded so far in this one, I'd say that's a good thing.

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