This Week’s Creature Feature … Zombie Alert
Well, maybe.
Actually, not likely.
But just in case, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the ever diligent government agency that tracks all things vital to our health — has published guidelines so that you’re prepared if the unlikely happens. Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse has been added to the centers Public Health Matters blog. Really.
“We posed a question on Twitter asking what are you prepared for. Hurricanes, floods?” explains Maggie Silver, a member of the Centers for Disease Control Zombie Task Force at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters. “A lot of people mentioned zombies. So we decided to do a blog about zombie preparedness and link it to regular preparedness, things you can use in real emergencies.”
Do the Centers for Disease Control really fear an attack of the zombies? No. But they do know bad stuff happens. And they want people to be prepared when it does.
Creepy creatures get a lot more attention than boring lists of how to prepare for a natural disaster. In just three weeks, the Zombie Apocalypse page received more than two million hits. The success of the zombie blog got the folks in Atlanta thinking about how to get people looking at sites offering realistic information on preparing for more likely emergencies.
“We’re getting ready to launch a video contest,” Silver says. “We are asking the public to show how they’ve prepped for an emergency, zombies or a real one.”
Preparing for a night of the living dead is probably a stretch, but it’s not so far-fetched to make a plan for a possible strike by Mother Nature. The season for hurricanes is upon us, and property and life-threatening storms are a real possibility. Being prepared for a natural disaster is dead serious.
Even if it takes a zombie to bring home the message.
www.emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp