Wouldn't zombies go after things like ACTUAL food instead of humans?
If we are talking about a zombie that's still "alive", the zombie would die from lack of water in a week MAX
For the military technology we have today, zombies shouldn't be a problem.
All we need to do is just explode the cities with mass zombies and kill out the herds, and then zombies would be considered as: "just another thing trying to take you down".
In a zombie apocalypse, everyone wouldn't be committing suicide, no, nothing like that. People would be training how to crowd control zombies from the military.
It would be almost impossible for a virus SO specific to create a zombie
If zombies were alive but kinda "dead", maggots would eat them
Everyone would get to high places like Denver and just wait for the zombies to die out.
7) That is like saying "oh it would be impossible for a virus to make animals act insane and bite each other" or "it would be insane to have a human prion spread by cannibalization". Nature.. uh. finds a way.
8) ??????? The dead can't really reanimate (except for cyanobacteria and viruses but that is another tangent of mine).
9) What does altitude have to do with pandemics? There is rabies in denver and many of those with Kuru come from mountainous regions.
1) As for infected attacking each other, that would be irrelevant. Neurotropic viral pathogens like rabies cause infected to attack each other, yet they are endemic. If humans were to act in a rabies-like manor then the sheer quantity of infected along with long incubation period would cause individuals to overnight turn into flesh-eaters, allowing spread.
2) Prions and viruses, if they are evolutionarily successful enough to replicate at all, need to have proper vectors for transmission. As such, the most certain evolutionary strategy is for hosts to attack other potential hosts with vigor, and then have a long incubation period.
3) Hydrophobia is present in some 4/5 of rabies cases yet it is endemic because of the long incubation periods (again). Long incubation periods are critical. Hydrophobia is not present in CDJ or kura, along with 1/4 of rabies patients, so the above point is not very much a concern.
4) Long incubation periods would make military installations themselves be viable breeding grounds for the infected. That is as absurd as saying "wolves have so many defenses and have the entire pack, so they will not get rabies". Infectious diseases do not care how many guns you have.
5) Assuming this would done, surly there would be infected who would have not shown symptoms yet (again, long incubation period).
6) That is the worst possible strategy for infectious diseases; you do not congregate. Keep in mind that plagues decimate urban populations that do not have medicine to counteract them (until the 19th century cities' populations would shrink and were only replenished due to rural population's migrations!). Even in decentralized populations lack of resistance would only promote continued endemic status.
"Zombies" are possible with some neurotropic viruses or prions especially (I will ignore other possible vectors for zombie-like traits). Neurotrophic viruses, such as rabies, are packets of rna that, once injected or entered into muscle tissue, rapidly replicate and attack the central nervous system. If there was a modified neurotrophic virus that did not result in death, unlike rabies, but included some rabies-like symptoms, such as anxiety, agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, or terror, and spread in a rabies-like manor (through biting typically) and did not have hydrophobic qualities then you would effectively have a zombie virus. Furthermore, it would be hard to eliminate because of the long incubation period, so it could very well become endemic. Prions such as kuru or CDJ are already well established and have been documented in humans. Kuru especially comes to mind: it is a prion, meaning even normal sterilization procedures do not eliminate the pathogen, and it is spread via cannibalism (prevalent in the regions of Papua New Guinea where it came from) and causes complete neurological breakdown and eventual death. If a common prion like CDJ were to spontaneously develop in such a way that cannibalistic qualities were included and develop a vector for transmission besides non-infected cannibalism then prions like kuru could effectively cause humanity's downfall, especially because prions are effectively incurable and have long incubation periods.
