Question: what would we do if there was a zombie attack?

Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 17 Mar 2014:

The first thing we would have to do is try to figure out why people were becoming zombies and then try to find a way to cure them.

If one zombie can make someone else into a zombie when they bite them then they must be spreading something infectious like a virus, bacteria or parasite. A good place to start would be to look at zombie bite wounds or zombie blood under a microscope. We can identify some bacteria and parasites in this way, but viruses are usually too small, even using a powerful electron microscope. Another approach would be to take zombie cells and ‘read’ all of the DNA inside using a sequencing machine to see if there was anything that was not human. We could then compare the non-human genes to all of the other genes that have ever been discovered to try to figure out what it was.

Once we knew what kind of infectious agent, or pathogen, we were dealing with, then we could start thinking about cures and vaccines. If the zombie pathogen had any similar features to known pathogens we could use existing drugs and vaccines as a starting place.

Another important experiment to do would be to prove that any pathogen we found in zombie cells really was the culprit – perhaps by infecting normal cells and making them zombie like. This kind of experiment is critical in research so that our time and money is spent on the right thing!