An interesting take on zombies would be a virally mediated …

Imagine getting a terrible flu, and after a high fever, discovering you can no longer perceive pain.

Imagine 30% of a population acquiring analgesia.

There's a reason people born with congenital analgesia don't often survive childhood, and why leprosy is so lethal.

Such an analgesia plague would hit poor people the hardest.

Restaurant workers scalding their forearms down to the muscle, warehouse workers not noticing they've crushed toes, etc

Hospitals would fill with people who'd suffered minor injuries of all kinds that'd gotten infected.

Or people who'd let illnesses go ignored until far too late.

You'd have people on the street with advanced fournier gangrene, lacerated bare feet and corneas, etc.

All denied medical care

It'd hit the US devastatingly.

Whole cities, mostly poor, mostly already with poor healthcare, would crumble and rot.

Whole economic sectors dissolving as the manual labor required literally tears apart the workers

Nosocomial infections spike.

You're in the waiting room next to a guy whose foot is rotting off. On the other side is a woman with 3rd degree burns on one entire arm

A large portion of the population would agitate for healthcare, some form of support.

They'd be given nothing, perhaps a bipartisan means-tested $300 check.

You'd have people rioting, cops unloading tear gas on unarmed crowds, causing horrific injuries with less-lethal munitions

There'd be videos of a 50 year old mother who'd taken a rubber bullet to her face, shattering her orbital bone and exploding her eye, continuing to advance

There'd be videos of cops ruthlessly stomping on people, and those people getting back up with broken bones, crawling with shattered pelvises, still shouting their demands for healthcare.

You'd see congress stall and obstruct, coming up with a million reasons why this healthcare is to expensive. A million op-eds blaming victims for their own misfortunes.

Hospitals forced to triage, sentencing people to die because it took them a month to even get seen

An analgesia plague would devastate the US, and would be handled competently in any other country.

People would protest, then riot, then war against any attempt to reenact historical segregation into leper colonies.

Basically, it'd be a zombie plague tailored to destroy only americans. And, much easier than trying to endogenously induce rage.

You don't need a rage virus if a perfectly normal one can cause rage.

Obviously, engineering leprosy's not an option.

You're gonna need a virus that specifically targets either the peripheral nervous system, or does better: retroviral mutation of the PRDM12 gene.

You need to induce a retroviral mutation of the PRDM12 gene and the FAAH-OUT gene. https://t.co/z7TRsKLkPi

Basically: knock-out the genes that regulate nociception.

For this, you need to engineer a lentivirus.

HIV is the best known lentivirus, but isn't ideal

https://t.co/PdKf2SDnL3

For one thing, its incubation is too long. For another, its not contagious enough and spreads inefficiently.

You want airborne transmission with high r0.

Measles would work perfectly if it had lentiviral characteristics.

People are already working on this problem: https://t.co/iUrgt21tcp

So: you engineer measles to knockout FAAH and PRDM12.

Bam: highly contagious, incredibly infectious, airborne analgesia with fast incubation *and* added immunological suppression.

With relative ease, you've created a completely realistic zombie virus just by removing people's ability to sense pain.

No mucking about with changing behaviour needed.

They will get all the rage they need when US society tries its bullshit on them.

If you do this, you can thank me by buying me some coffee https://t.co/1qrALS85xo

Or rice https://t.co/TRTsg6UUwh

An interesting take on zombies would be a virally mediated analgesia.

This kind of zombie plague has already happened before. Leprosy-induced neuropathy has been a thing for all of human history.

You'd just need to improve upon it.

More from Anosognosiogenesis

More from Society

You May Also Like

An interesting take on zombies would be a virally mediated analgesia.This kind of zombie plague has already happened before. Leprosy-induced neuropathy has been a thing for all of human history.You'd just need to improve upon it.

More from Anosognosiogenesis

More from Society

You May Also Like

An interesting take on zombies would be a virally mediated analgesia.

This kind of zombie plague has already happened before. Leprosy-induced neuropathy has been a thing for all of human history.

You'd just need to improve upon it.