Parasites, viruses, and baterica, oh my! Real life zombie like ailments.

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Someone tweeted me s link to this article today. It's a little freaky all the modern ailments that resemble the Romero esque zombie virus, but I think it's given me some ideas for a zombie story. I feel my muse stretching a bit. Maybe she's willing to try and take a bit out of this one.

On a side note, I'd like to hazard a guess the author of the following piece is in their twenties. Zombies haven't really dominated Scien fiction or horror for more than about 10 years. 10 years can feel like a life time when it's half of yours.

Zombies have dominated science fiction for years. But they don't actually exist, right? Wrong. There are several real-life diseases that could make you act like a zombie.

If we're going to talk about zombie-like diseases, we first need to decide what the symptoms of being a zombie actually are. Obviously, the big one - you know, being literally, actually (un)dead - isn't something with any real world medical parallels, so we'll just have to restrict ourselves to diseases that make people act like the walking dead. That would include traits like rotting or dead flesh, a trance-like state that would rob people of any sign of higher cognitive function, an inability to communicate in anything more than moans and grunts, a slow, shuffling gait, and (if we're really lucky) a taste for human brains, or at the very least the desire to bite people.

Is there a single disease that can do all that? Well...no. But there are a whole heap of diseases that can do quite a few of those, and that's plenty terrifying enough. Indeed, let's start with the most horrific possibility of them all:And now for the rest of the story.

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