Only frequent, increasingly effective attacks against humanity's transformed brethren would win an actual zombie war, he said. "Because it only takes one zombie to overtake a city," neither quarantine nor a slower disease progression could stop the Zombie Apocalypse - only delay it, Smith said. That high infectivity makes the zombie epidemic unstoppable in most cases, according to Smith's model. In " World War Z," for instance, Pitt's character counts out the seconds from bite to zombification, whereas most infections take days, months or even years in the case of HIV to manifest. In zombie movies, the affliction spreads fast, Mackay said. The most important parameter, however, was the infectivity of the zombie disease. Having two nonlinear factors makes zombie math extremely sensitive to small changes to parameters, Smith said. Most disease models include only one nonlinear element: disease transmission. Those elements - infections and attacks on zombies - made the model more complicated, because they introduce two nonlinear factors, or factors that don't change at a constant rate, said Smith, who has modeled outbreaks of HIV, malaria and West Nile virus. "And people don't try to kill the people who have an infection." "Usually, the dead aren't a dynamic variable," Smith said. Īnalyzing zombies adds a couple of new wrinkles to traditional disease modeling, Smith said: Dead people can be resurrected as zombies, and humans will attack the infected. The movie is (somewhat loosely) based on Max Brooks' novel of the same name, which included unprecedented, true-to-life detailabout the political, medical and sociological ramifications of a zombie outbreak, earning the thriller a spot on a U.S. "Trying to find the index case, or case zero, bears quite a resemblance to conventional epidemiology," Mackay said. inspector searching the globe for the origin of the zombie outbreak, paralleling the quests of many real-life virus hunters, Mackay said. … It's an extreme virus-transmission event, if you like." "A zombie is a bit like giving a virus legs and teeth," said Ian MacKay, a virologist at the Australian Infectious Diseases Research Centre, University of Queensland, who bloggedabout "World War Z." "This is basically a virus taking over a host, and spreading very quickly and efficiently. It also shows that zombies would overtake the world- there's no chance for a "stable equilibrium" in which humans could coexist with the undead or eradicate the disease. Īs for a zombie apocalypse, Smith's model shows that a zombie infection would spread quickly (with N representing total population, S the number of susceptible people, Z the zombies, and bthe likelihood of transmission). Their likeness to viruses makes the creatures ideal subjects for theoretical epidemiological analyses, which can be used to capture the public's imagination as well as explore scientific principles, Smith said. Though of course done tongue-in-cheek, Smith's study demonstrates why zombies are the viruses of the monster world. ![]() Smith's work has inspired other researchers to create zombie mathematical models, which will be published with Smith's work in the upcoming book, "Mathematical Modeling of Zombies" (University of Ottawa Press, 2014). Smith?, a mathematics professor at the University of Ottawa who spells his name with a "?" at the end, and his students. ![]() That's because the calculation describes the rate of zombie transmission, from one walking dead individual to many, according to its creators, Robert J. That is, if you ever found yourself in the midst of a zombie pandemic. This equation could spell your doom: (bN)(S/N)Z = bSZ.
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