Now, what did you get from that? Kind of a freaky thought, eh? Disease-laden mosquitoes zipping around, reproducing wildly in our unused swimming pools and causing major health risks. Now, unless you happen to be unlucky enough to be around a lot of foreclosed homes with pools, this isn't a major risk to you as we slip into the autumn and winter months. In fact, there's no guarantee that it will become a major problem in more than a few concentrated areas.
There is one application of this hazard that I doubt many others have thought about, though. It's something that's on my mind a lot. I'm talking, of course, about a zombie apocalypse.
In almost every source of zom-pocalypse fiction, the survivors of the outbreak have to deal with the zombies themselves as well as looters, food and supply shortages, insanity, and the occasional thought of repopulation. What they rarely have to deal with, though, is disease. Think about it. Millions, if not billions, of walking corpses, shambling around and rotting at various levels of severity and not cleaning their pools. Mosquitoes use the pools as breeding grounds and populations skyrocket. Natural wildlife starts to die off due to disease, much of it transferred from the infected to mosquitoes to animals. These tiny insects would be terrifyingly dangerous to survivors, because a zombie infection is often transferred through bodily fluid if not only by a bite. Looking beyond even the thought of mosquito-zombification, there are still normal diseases to worry about just as much. Those don't really go away. West Nile and Lime Disease become as threatening to survivors in mild climates as the infected themselves, as do the animals potentially infected by bugs with any number of diseases on their own. So now the last survivors of humanity are restricted even farther as to where they are safe, how they can prepare, and where they can go.
This is, of course, suspending disbelief and expecting survivors to still be around after a couple months. Looking at a zombie outbreak realistically (this is where a healthy suspension of disbelief comes into play), the most important thing aside from containment would be eliminating outside threats. Pools and man-maintained bodies of standing water would have to continue to be maintained, a time-consuming and sometimes difficult process.
I think I'm doing my part here and now to save the world, one zombie apocalypse theory for survival at a time.
That video clip was as pathetic an attempt to justify wall-street bailout as your apocalyptic offshoot was entertaining. Both, however, were rather inventive.
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