• Question: Will there be a zombie apocalypse in the near future

    Asked by anon-290633 on 17 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Alba Park de la Torriente

      Alba Park de la Torriente answered on 17 Mar 2021:

      I think it is very unlikely that a zombie apocalypse happens. But there are other issues that should concern us as much as a zombie apocalypse. We are in the middle of a climate crisis and things could get very bad in terms of famine, displaced people, natural disasters, etc. I study infectious diseases and I am particularly concerned about antibiotic resistance. In the past decades, there is a rise in bacterial infections that are difficult to cure because they have become resistant to many (if not all) of the antibiotics that exist. At the moment this is affecting only a few people, but the problem is increasing steadily. If we don’t change the way in which we use antibiotics, in the future, we might find ourselves in a scenario where a lot of people will be at risk of dying due to common bacterial diseases.

    • Photo: Callum Thomas

      Callum Thomas answered on 17 Mar 2021:

      Hopefully not! At the moment we don’t know of any disease or way that people could turn into zombies like in films and it seems pretty unlikely that one could occur in the way that it is shown in films. And if zombies were people that came back from the dead like in some movies, they would start to decompose very quickly: things like flies or insects tend to break dead animals down extremely quickly! Pretty quickly they wouldn’t be able to chase or bite anyone.

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