RedHanded - ShortHand: How Likely is a Zombie Apocalypse?

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Rage-inducing viruses that spread through bites; a flesh-eating fungus that controls its host like a puppet; deadly pathogens trapped for millennia in Arctic ice… sometimes nature is more gruesome than fiction.From the Walking Dead to the Last of Us, stories of contagion are never far from our screens. So what are the closest real-life scenarios that could turn our world into a full-on zombie wasteland? (And, what makes insects go on a sex-crazed, amphetamine-fuelled rampage until their literal butts fall off?) This is the ShortHand.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello, hello, and welcome to us sitting in a room together, which for ages we couldn't do. Having quite recently dragged ourselves through the global pandemic, we know how fast and how life-changing the viruses can spread over this little blue dot that we have to live on, and how totally inept governments can be at containing them. So just imagine how entirely fucked we would be, if the virus we were fighting to contain did more than just weaken people or kill them.

What if, instead, there was a virus that changed people? What if it took from people the ability to reason or recognize their own families? What if it replaced emotions with deep atavistic rage What if this virus flew invisibly from person to person turning them into terrifying hordes of mindless aggressors? If that ever happened, all the disinfectant in the world couldn't save us or even washing your hands to happy birthday twice.

All being locked up in your house. Slowly descending into alcoholism and pissing in my washing basket. Yes, I remember it all too well, thank you very much. Yeah. So the reason all this sounds like it's pulled straight out of science fiction is because it is. Zombies are a certified pop culture phenomena. But unlike their Halloween costume counterparts

like vampires, ghouls and witches, zombie law today is rooted in science. The tradition originally comes from Haitian Vodou, a wildly misunderstood religion that we actually did a whole separate short hand on which you should definitely go listen to. But in Voodoo, zombie start off as individual, undead monsters. Previously dead people, brought back through possession by demigods called Lua. It was done to one body at a time for a specific purpose. And importantly, you couldn't

catch it. The idea changed over the years with the influence of ghost and vampire myths. And zombie law now, more than anything, is a story of contagion. A virus spread through bites or even just pass through the air. One that changes people into ravenous, mindless monsters, hell-bent on sinking their teeth into people to spread the disease. In modern zombie stories, from the evil dead to 28 days later in The Last of Us, writers and showrunners have expanded on the zombie myth. So let's explore the very worst that deadly pathogens can do.

Just how close to reality are we talking? This week, we're looking through all of the, most likely real-life scenarios in which something like a zombie outbreak could occur. And we're going to do a little brush up on what we've covered before, the teeth gnashing mind-bending frenzy of rabies. You were asking me earlier about seals in Cape Town. They've all got rabies. Oh, okay.

But how are you a seal with hydrophobia? Answer me that, internet. Anyway, moving on. We're going to look at the crafty, bodily controlling fungus, cordiscese. which makes insects go on a sex-mad amphetamine-fueled rampage until their literal butts fall off. And we explore the possibility of ancient viruses trapped for millions of years in the Siberian permafrost, being released back into the air. This is the shorthand. Like we said, the rules on what exactly constitutes a zombie varies from story to story.

The U.S.-based zombie research society defines a zombie with three criteria. A, it is a reanimated human corpse. It's a very strong start. B, it is relentlessly aggressive. And C, it is biologically infected and infectious. Item A is the one we'll spend the least amount of time talking about today. You can't bring people back from the dead. So, yeah, it's immediately a bit of a foible. in these three points that have to be met.

But before we move on, we should probably mention the Haitian zombie drug. In April 1962, Claverius Narcist checked into a hospital in DeShapples, Haiti. He was spitting up blood, and he was confused and feverish. Three days later, he was pronounced dead, and a day later, he was buried.

Then, 18 years later, he came back to the village. His relatives recognised him immediately and he even backed his identity up by recalling intimate family information. Claravis said that he'd been paralysed but fully conscious for his entire burial and then said his body was dug up and given a strange paste by a voodoo priest.

He said that he quickly gained back control of his body but stayed dazed, confused and compliant. Clarivas said that he was made to work on a sugar plantation for years and told investigators that he believed he had been made into a zombie and that the sorcerer had taken his soul. I'm watching a TV show at the moment, which I'm quite enjoying actually. It sounds terrible, but it is actually quite good. It's called evil. Terrible name, terrible name. But it's about a priest, hot priest, obviously, classic.

Or he's not a priest yet. He's about to become a priest. He's about to be ordained. but he's in seminary and a psychologist and they team up and they investigate miracles and or possessions

and or like other nefarious or very nice things that are happening by people who are coming to the church claiming that it is possession or an angel or something like this and then it's like Christian X-Files okay yeah exactly

and then at the end of each episode is like they always find like a potential scientific solution but the priest is like, but we still don't know. Oh, so literally Christian X-Files. It's fun. It is fun. I'm sold. It is fun, honestly. And in that, in one of the episodes are talking about zombies, and I didn't know this.

I know I wrote the Haitian Vodoo episode on this, the short-hand that we did before, but it was talking about the sugar plantation thing. So I'm not surprised that Clarivas is saying that because it was this idea that zombies were actually something that was made up by owners of sugar plantations. who would say that as a way to stop slaves from killing themselves because the conditions were so horrible, because they told them, if you kill yourself, you will come back, we will turn you into a zombie, and you will be forced to work the sugar plantation for all eternity as a zombie.

Whereas if you just work this sugar plantation like you're supposed to, and then you die, you might go to heaven. So don't you dare kill yourself? And that's actually where the myth originally came from, and it was used as a way to scare slaves from killing themselves. which I thought was quite interesting. In Claravis's case, what do we think actually happened? The most likely explanation was put forward by ethnobotanist Wade Davis.

He suspected that Claravis was given a mixture of naturally occurring but highly potent chemicals. Did you know that 25% of drugs in a pharmacy come from the Amazon rainforest? Yes. Cool. So I believe it. If you mix a toxin found in a puffer fish with one found on top. and apply it to a wound, you become Homer Simpson. Or you can induce a coma so deep that medical instruments would register you as dead.

And as for the wake-up jail, Davis thinks that that is most likely a weed called Datora stramonium, otherwise known as a devil's trumpet. It's a powerful hallucinogen, which is known to be used ritually to induce intense, sacred or occult visions. It's all spooky stuff, but as we said, it's a one-at-a-time sort of ritual. Making this kind of zombieism into a large-scale epidemic would take a hell of a lot of turds. So if we leave reanimated corpses to one side, what are the real-life pathogens that are most similar to an on-screen zombie outbreak? Best place to start is rabies. And we do have a shorthand on rabies, so go and download that one to hear about the young girl who, against all the odds,

became the first known person in history to survive the disease. But for now, we're going to take a quick look at the virus itself and how likely it is to break out and turn the world into mindless, bloodthirsty, zombies. Take me first. It'll probably be useful to start with the basics, like what's a virus? Well, essentially, it's a little bundle of genetic instructions wrapped up in a nice little protein shell. When it bumps into a cell, it replaces that cell's instructions with its own. and the cell instead of doing its normal job starts to manufacture the virus instead.

It's not conscious, it's not responsive, it doesn't make decisions, it just spreads because it's invasive and destructive. And sorry to tell you, but you and every human being on earth is inhaling thousands of viral particles every single day. But thankfully, your immune system is incredible and destroys most viruses before any symptoms can. even develop. Still, some viruses are one step ahead and rabies is one of them. When an infected animal or person bites a non-infected one, the virus comes into contact with muscle tissue and it

stays there. The virus stays out of the bloodstream, so the immune system remains oblivious as the virus grows and infects more cells. Only when it's strong enough, Does the virus finally enter the nervous system and hot-footed to the brain? The individual feels a tingling sensation near the bite and then... It is way, way too late, to act. They already have a 99% chance of death. In a flash, the person changes. They can become delirious, aggressive, paranoid and adverse to light.

And they become deathly afraid of water. and that's because the virus doesn't want you to swallow your saliva. It wants you spitting and foaming all around because that increases the chance of infection. So infected people are aggressive and unpredictable and if they bite you, you go the same way and that sounds like a zombie to me. The good-ish news is that rabies is actually quite bad

at spreading between humans. Spreading the virus through saliva mostly needs a deep and violent bite and not all sufferers get what is known as furious rabies with the gnashing and the hyperactivity. But it is quite a hard way to then spread it because people are like, that person's nuts, don't go fucking near them,

that person's got rabies. Most people just become severely ill and confused. So compared to airborne viruses like the flu or COVID, rabies is very slow going. The only way that it could really fuck us as if the rabies virus mutated to be better at traveling through the air like COVID did.

Viruses mutate pretty much every time they find a new host. And in some bat-filled caves in Texas, rabies virus has been recorded in the air. Don't go in there. Stay away from the bats. Did you learn nothing? Stay away from caves. Stay away from bats.

Let's close all of the caves. Why are we doing this again? That and the air rabies is thought to have infected and killed two researchers just from breathing it in. Oh, good. So if a future mutation of air rabies develops to be airborne for longer so it can travel away from the caves in Texas, we are in trouble. The next course on our zombie infection tasting menu is cordyceps. You might know cordyceps as the breakout star of HBO's The Last of Us.

The show is set in a world in which spore-spreading, mind-altering fungus has taken over most of the world's living things. And the virus on the show is based on a very real fungus, cordyceps, which acts as an endoparasitoid on insects. And this is pretty fascinating stuff. Basically, a fungus is not an animal or a plant, but it is very much alive. Fungi eat organic matter, so plants and animals, and the only way they can grow is through their food.

And they talk to each other on their internet. Yeah. Now, most fungi are content to chow down on dead or dying matter or snack on castoffs like mulled hair or shedded skin. But not these cordyceps. Cordyceps feed on a live host. And while it's doing so, it also controls that host. Like a little insect puppet.

Marinet master. I wouldn't mind being a puppet for like a day. I'm tired. Someone take the wheel. Most kinds of. Chordyceps are tailored specifically to feed on just one insect species. And its whole existence is built around feeding off and manipulating that one species to spread its nasty spores as fast as it can.

The first one we'll look at is Orfeo-Cordyceps unilateralis, otherwise known as zombie ant fungus to make it similar. Its spores lie dormant in the soil in humid tropical forests in North America, Europe, East and Southeast Asia. And it lies there sleeping until it is unwisible. riddingly trodden on by a little ant. And then it latches on and starts boring through the ant's exoskeleton and into its body. For a while, the ant seems totally normal to the rest of the colony. And that is important because ants are savage. If one gets sick, it is banished from the rest of the colony and left to die.

So, the ant carries on as normal for the first few hours. But all the while, the cordycepses are growing, wrapping flapping fracking, wrapping fungal threads around the ant's muscle tissue, getting all up in its nervous system. And this is key. Chordyceps isn't interested in the ant's stupid little brain, just hijacks the ant's muscles. And from then on, the ant is powerless to fight it. Then the cordyceps makes the ant wander off from its colony. Having lost all control, it walks towards the most humid spot it can find, climbs to a leaf

that's about 11 inches off the ground, which is a small. the perfect spot for a sports sniper. The ant is made to then walk to the edge and sink its teeth into a leaf with all its remaining strength, in an action known as a death grip. And there it will stay as the cordycep eats the ant alive from the inside.

And when the fungus is strong enough, days after the ant has died, it's time for one final flourish. A long, winding, standing stalk suddenly bursts out of the ant's head. Whoa. Grim. That is grim.

It's the fungus's fruiting structure. Basically a big hose. To spray out, you guessed it, fungal spores all over that patch of forest. Spores rain down, some ideally landing on more ants, and some staying dormant in the soil, awaiting,

be tripped. The zombie and fungus is the most famous. But there are actually lots of different cordyceps that hijack other insects in maybe even wilder ways. One variant of cordyceps is massospora and that only affects cicadas. It essentially eats them from the inside out before turning them into a drugged-up sex-crazed zombie. In cicada mating cycles, the males send out mating calls and the females flick their wings to show that they're interested. But when a male cicada comes down with the case of the goddesseps, it starts responding with the female wing flick too. This makes it highly attractive to both sexes. So it goes around shagging any and all takers. By this time,

the cicada's abdomen will be chock full of spores, eventually destroying its entire lower half, and making it fall off. And that's just the beginning. Then the butt the butt that's the male cicada will go absolutely nuts. It gets a huge rush of energy and stays awake for days. The leading theory is that the cicada is high as a kite, absolutely flooded with an amphetamine called catanone, which is essentially cicada speed. Some have even found to be pumped with psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms. With fungal spores still shooting out of their back sides, the cicadas fly around all over the place,

spreading spores like a possessed salt shaker, and probably seeing everything look a bit twinkling. Then totally exhausted of missing their entire bottom half, the cicadas spent body drops to the ground, and it's all over. Being infected with a deadly fungus that will force you to dance around wildly shagging everything that moves into your ass literally falls off is not everyone's idea of a good time.

Well, but the... Good news is that they are a long way off scaling up to working on us vertebrates. Cordercepts, like we said, are hyper-specialised to a single species, and it tends to choose ones that are pretty easy to hijack. Mammals and other vertebrars are pretty complex, and it will probably take them tens of thousands of years to evolve enough to take us on. That's not to say it's impossible, though. For example, athletes' foot, yeast infections, and thrush are all fungi and have evolved to get into human tissue. Don't I know it?

But we're away off from them controlling our brains or our muscles or our feet or our vaginas. I don't know. If I've got thrush, I feel pretty controlled. In fact, it might reassure you to note that people in China have been drinking cordyceps for hundreds of years. Scientists started studying it in 1993 when Chinese long-distance runners started breaking world records and they were found to be drinking. a tonic made from zombie fungus. And you can even buy it here, apparently, in high-end wellness brands, and it's thought to help with respiratory, liver, heart and lung diseases.

So there you go. And for our last potential zombie apocalypse, we are taking you to the frozen north. About a fifth of the entire northern hemisphere is covered by permafrost, the soil that has stayed below zero degrees for thousand, sometimes millions of years. It's very cold. It's very dark. And it's extremely low on oxygen too. Which just so happens to make it perfect for preserving biological material.

In fact, as geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie told the observer, you could put a yoghurt in permafrost and it still might be edible 50,000 years later. which makes it ideal for trapping ancient prehistoric pathogens. In 2014, Claverie led a team of researchers all the way up to the northernmost points of Russia to isolate what they call mthuselam microbes. Love it. Or zombie viruses.

They took samples of ancient earth from the permafrost and found viruses lying dormant in the soil. And then... Just because you can doesn't mean you should. They brought them back to life. The team even intentionally infected single-cell organisms with these diseases. Thereby proving that viruses trapped in permafrost do have the potential to re-animate and infect living hosts.

And making that a very dicey prospect, indeed, is climate change. The Earth is getting hotter, nowhere more so than in the northern most parts of the world. The Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world since 1979. So permafrost is thawing at a scary pace. An organic matter that's been trapped up there for millions of years is being unfrozen. In 2016, a heat wave in northern Siberia meant that some parts of that region hit 38 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic Circle. So the permafrost thawed.

It exposed reindeer carcasses that had been infected with, anthrax. It caused the world's first anthrax outbreak for decades, and it even took a child's life. The danger suddenly seemed very real. Scientists believed that permafrost might contain viruses that are up to a million years old. That's quite a lot older than our species, who evolved about 300,000 years ago. That means that no human immune system has ever come into contact with those particular microbes. It's a very real possibility that some of these viruses affected Neanderthals and may have even killed off other similar species. And the zombie virus discovery to just keep on coming. In 2022, a sample was found in Siberia, there was more than 48,500 years old. It's the oldest

frozen virus to infected living cells. It was named quite poetically, as Pandora virus for its ominous implications of a potential worldwide shitstorm. The good news so far is that all prehistoric viruses that have been found are only able to affect amoebae and pose zero risk to humans, but trust no bitch, fucking hell, we learn nothing. And there is a lot of permafrost to go. There's a lot going on a lot deeper. And the earth is only getting hotter.

God knows what human-compatible viruses might be unleashed in the future. The Russians, for one, are convinced that it is only a matter of time. They have a state laboratory in Siberia called Vector with a K, which was built to build biological weapons. Now it's used for chemical research, mostly into viruses, which are the same thing. And they have made it their mission to find and identify paleo-viruses. They're probing the remains of mammoths,

woolly rhinoceroses and other prehistoric animals. And they are really playing with fire. They're literally reviving these mammal viruses in lab conditions. If anything was compromised, it is not totally impossible that an ancient infection could make the leap to our animals. And that's not even the most reckless things humans are doing, vis-a-vis ancient zombie pathogens. because in some ways we're not so much as opening Pandora's box

we're pummeling it with a jackhammer. Don't make me go back inside, I can't do it again. Fuck that shit. With the melting sea ice, shipping and development have also increased in the region. And huge mining operations are waiting in the wings to swoop in and drill into the permafrost for oil and oars.

This will release vast amounts of pathogens and changing land use is actually one of the key things that cause epidemic outbreaks. The Nipar virus was spread by fruit bats who were driven from their habitats by humans. Monkeypox was linked to the spread of urbanization in Africa. These days, there's an Arctic monitoring network that's keeping an eye out for early cases of any new diseases out there. Quarantine facilities are being built and medical supplies brought over. So if a million-year-old virus is unleashed, there will be a small group of Plucky Sun.

scientists up on that frozen Arctic fighting to contain it and potentially save the world. So, yeah, that feels like a pretty good film plotline we can all wait to watch once we figured out who the survivors are. What I am so glad has never happened yet. I was so worried that, like, post-COVID, because obviously people were trying to make like Zoom TV shows because everything was shut down. I was so concerned that after we made it out the other side, if we did, I didn't know at the time, I was like, I really do not want to have to sit through television dramas about COVID. I just did it. There was this one BBC series about the depressed fisherman in Cornwall and it was the only thing that they could make because it was like out in the open. And I was living with my mum, I was like, mom, if you make me watch the depressed fisherman one more time, I will become more depressed than all of them and hang myself. Like I just, I cannot. Who can't watch that? There was nothing else we could watch. But I think they were the only people who could make television in the whole of the kingdom at the time. But I'm so glad that we have not yet reached the era where people are making TV shows about being in lockdown, because that will finish me off. No one will watch that. Do not make it.

Or just wait till I'm dead. Thank you. That is all we have time for this week. But there are lots of very scary disaster scenarios out there, not just dramas about lockdowns. We didn't even have time to tell you about the borne virus, which is a retrovirus. that makes horses go wild and smash their skulls into walls. And then there's mad cow disease, and it's human equivalent, C-J-D, which is practically unstoppable and makes holes in your brain. There's also epidemics of zombifying drugs like fentanyl, crocodile and flacker,

which make people aggressive, unpredictable and superhumanly strong. And there's also all sorts of invasive parasitic nightmares in the animal kingdom. But thankfully, barring some crazy evolutionary fluke, any large-scale epidemic in humans is likely to stay on the silver screen. Knock any wood or your head if you're not near any wood. I'm not fucking doing that shit again. So that's it, guys. That is our shorthand on zombie viruses and just hope we leave it at that.

Wash your hands. Yeah. Don't breathe. Leave the bats alone. All that. Stay out of the caves. Bye. Bye.