With that title we're trying to boost our traffic and maybe even get Typepad to crash:
In 2011 Steven Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, went on a late-night radio show and said he had recently discovered a paper about a mysterious disease, called Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency syndrome, written by a doctor from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who had died before having the chance to publish it.
According to the paper, "ANSD" destroyed the frontal lobe while leaving the amygdala intact, essentially transforming victims into lurching vessels of unchecked rage—or zombies, if you’d like.
The disease was made up, of course. Dr. Schlozman also writes fiction, and he had invented ANSD for a novel called The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks From the Apocalypse. ...
The radio host was in on the joke, he wrote, and they were just having fun discussing the zombie scourge in a faux-serious tone. (In his fake paper, Dr. Schlozman attributes zombies’ constant groaning to constipation.)
But some listeners didn’t get the joke. "Emails showed up in my in-box," wrote Dr. Schlozman, "and I got questions along the lines of: What’s the best medicine to stave off the zombie infection? How do I keep my house safe from the zombie onslaught?"
Later that year Ali S. Khan, director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, cited Dr. Schlozman in a blog post he wrote about how people should prepare for a zombie epidemic. The post was titled "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse." The blog post was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek way of getting readers to prepare for more-realistic threats, like hurricanes, by prodding the imagination. It was at least halfway successful: Traffic to the CDC blog increased sixtyfold, causing servers to crash.
It’s unclear how many of those visitors read the item with an appropriately large grain of salt, but many hailed the CDC’s experiment as a success.
via chronicle.com
This post mentions hurricanes so it is in the natural hazards category and definitely on-topic (we don't have an All Hallows' Eve category).
