On February 14th, I checked my phone to find the following notification: “Experts say a fatal disease causing ‘zombie’ symptoms in deer may be transmittable to humans. Here’s what to look out for.”
We had recently finished watching Dead Set for class which immediately came to mind. I remember thinking, maybe this is how the characters first contracted their zombie like disease in the show. This led me to wonder if that then meant we had the possibility of contracting something similar. The part of that notification that really struck me was the last sentence: “Here’s what to look out for”. This sentence evoked a sense of urgency and danger as I found myself wondering if there was something I needed to be on the look out for so I could avoid becoming a zombie like the characters on Dead Set.
As my curiosity continued I opened and read the Huffington Post article in its entirety. The author, Nina Golgowski, warned about the dangers of Chronic wasting disease (CWD) and also admitted that there has been no recorded transmissions from animals to humans. I also discovered that “‘To date, there is no strong evidence for the occurrence of CWD in people, and it is not known if people can get infected with CWD prions,’ the CDC’s website states.” After reading the article in it’s entirety I realized that there is not real threat on contracting this zombie disease especially because I never come in direct contact with deer and I do not eat deer meat.
This realization lead me to question zombie rhetoric and what it is used for. In the case of this article, I noticed that Golgowski used the word zombie to catch the reader’s attention so they would actually read the article. Just like the creators of Dead Set, Golgowski noticed that people are scared and terrified of not only zombies themselves but also becoming a zombie. Therefore, Zombie rhetoric can be used not only in TV shows like Dead Set, but also in the media and in scientific articles to spark interest and awareness of a phenomena.