The most effective countermeasure against zombie outbreaks has previously been shown to be aerial bombardment. Troops on the ground are not favoured because they are ineffective at the dismemberment – a prerequisite for zombie inactivation. However, carefully targeted high explosives successfully achieve this. A regrettable corollary is collateral damage, as nearby human life is inevitably destroyed. However, these innocent bystanders would, in the absence of intervention, would likely have become zombies – and a threat to their neighbours. This contingency is introduced into the model as a ‘user-directed interaction’ which destroys humans and zombies, making them functionally equivalent: in other words, non-infectious.
Bill is of course talking about a computer game, but his excellent article at lablit.com perfectly describes the issues that have to be dealt with by medical and scientific professionals in the face of an infectious disease outbreak.
His description of a cordon sanitaire (or fire-break) and how such a strategy was used in the UK's most recent epidemic of foot and mouth disease is particularly worth reading. It also has implicatons for the management of, to be completely random, the release by terrorists of a weaponized biological agent or a rapidly-mutating, species-hopping virus.
It is not improbable that we will have to make such difficult decisions the Blue Room in the not too distant future. It might pay to think about them in advance.
