Center for Disease Control Hopefully Joking About Zombie Preparedness

Photo: Scott Garfield/TWD Productions/AMC

The Center for Disease Control, normally staid for understandable reasons — infectious pandemics are about as serious as it gets — posted a primer earlier this week on how to plan for ... a zombie outbreak. Tips include:

Identify the types of emergencies that are possible in your area. Besides a zombie apocalypse, this may include floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes. If you are unsure contact your local Red Cross chapter for more information.

And:

Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.

There are two possibilities here:

1) This is just a fun way of making people aware of emergency preparations that are also, as the above advice mentions, applicable to real-life disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes. Weather phenomena are boring, while the mere mention of zombies throws the Internet into a tizzy that can be matched only by Justin Bieber tweeting about anything. Indeed, CDC spokesman David Daigle tells Fox News, "The idea is we're reaching an audience or a segment we'd never reach with typical messages." That strategy has been a huge success — the zombie primer quickly became the most popular post the CDC has ever put online. "A typical post gets 1,000 hits,” Daigle tells the Times. “We got 10,000, then 30,000 on Tuesday, and then it crashed the server.”

2) The whole "this is just a fun and silly way to get people excited about emergency preparedness!" thing is a cover for the CDC's true purpose: to ready America for an actual zombie outbreak — perhaps coinciding with Judgment Day this Saturday? — without inducing chaos in the streets. Or maybe it's already begun. Come to think of it, we feel like we might have seen one earlier today.

CDC Warns Public to Prepare for 'Zombie Apocalypse' [Fox News]
A Spotlight on Public Health, Invaded by Zombies [NYT]