Protozoa-based Zombie Infection

Imagine a Zombie Apocalypse not caused by a virus or a fungi, instead caused by protozoa. Yes, a protozoa infection. Well as you see the protozoa infection which causes the zombie apocalypse is called the Plasmodium Kegilaan. It's a contagious disease which causes zombification of a human.

The symptoms of the Plasmodium Kegilaan include, high fever, abscess, boils, strong coughing fits, minor wart growth, skin discoloration, muscle cramps, fatigue, explosive diarrhea, insomnia, twitching, sepsis, meningitis, coma, psychosis, other unknown and unidentified symptoms and finally zombification. The protozoa is suspected and confirmed to influence thought patterns of the Infected or known by survivor or populace, Plasgils.

The method of transmission is usually air, water, fecal-oral and animal. This disease in known to be highly dangerous and the transmission is possible for collapse of countries and failure of the military due to zombification and water supply being infected with the protozoa.

The date when the infection appeared is 6 May 2015. The locations were in a reservoir which was used as a swimming hole in Missouri and a river near to a village in Perak, Malaysia. The disease was spread all over the world in 30th May 2015 and caused more contagious outbreaks of zombification of the Plasmodium Kegilaan.

So the main story is about a group of children and teenagers surviving a zombie apocalypse in this ultraviolent horror story

Opinions and suggestions?

My background isn't in the sciences, so I can only speak to the world-building.

The speed with which the infection spread is unlikely for a number of reasons. For one, drinking water sanitation protocols are meant to wipe out this sort of thing, and even swimming pool-levels of chlorination keep this sort of thing from happening. So how did it spread so quickly, and/or why is it able to survive?

What exactly is "Zombification" in this context? If you keep the infected alive it will sidestep the usual weirdness of how putrefying flesh is capable of movement, let alone surviving exposure to any elements.

That list of symptoms will get noticed fast, especially if it shows up worldwide. What keeps the world governments from properly mobilizing against it, and once it's identified as a protozoa (otherwise there's not much need for this explanation) what prevents any mobilization?

What makes things so ultraviolent, and how do the teens avoid infection (without stepping on the toes of any current zombie media)?

I have a few suggestions, but they may not be necessary depending on how you were planning it out.

First of all, the protozoa is resistant to chlorination and other water purification process, the only way to sterilize it is to subject into intense levels of infrared radiation, temperatures of 200 Fahrenheit and a chemical mixture of iron, copper and zinc.

Second, zombification means you turn into a living Infection type zombie.

Third, the governments and the World Health Organization is unable mobilized properly is because the disease came out all of sudden around the world and when it was recognized as a protozoa, it was already too late as the outbreak of zombie infection reached world wide critical and severe proportions.

Finally, ultraviolent means extremely violent story and the kids survive the infection by not being immune, but lucky that they are not infected by the disease (And using violent weapons and checking the food and water supplies)

And another behavior of the protozoa zombie would be they are attracted to dark and silent places.

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Hm. A magma-based lifeform that has mutated to survive in what we'd consider "normal" conditions? (Or some version of Kankel?) But the conditions it can survive means you're going to have to jump through some hoops to explain why the teens don't just die of dehydration or starvation; ie, why their supplies never become infected.

I ask again: define what zombification means here. You don't want to skip over Our Zombies Are Different and assume that calling something a zombie will mean the same thing to everyone.

The list of symptoms make it too easy to detect a protozoan infection; a sufficiently cautious medical professional will start checking bodily wastes with any of those symptoms, and especially if certain kinds of diarrhea are present. (To say nothing of a sudden jump in antigens.)

So, are the teens actively being hunted down or ramming through mobs of infected? What situations exactly are prompting ultra-levels of violence? (And why aren't they able to avoid them, if they're attracted to such places and can therefore be avoided with a boombox?)

And, if things are so violent, why aren't the teens quickly infected by being near an infected?

Well, most of the supplies that the teens and the children discover are often canned food and bottled water that had been deployed by the WHO and the CDC that has been left to be abandoned.

Define zombification. Zombification in this world means, infected by disease that can cause symptoms of insanity, cognitive degeneration and bad symptoms which are beyond control of the human to fight off.

The reason why the protozoan infection was unable to be detected is because the protozoa looks innocent and symptoms come after 24 days later when the person is infected. The protozoa often replicates non-stop and the infection often suppreses the immune system.

The teens and the children who are surviving the contagion are often switches between actively hunted down or ramming through mobs of infected. The light and sound the is required to chase them away is between conflagration-levels of fire for light and EDM concert level of loudness for sound.

To be infected by the Plasgils (Protozoa zombies) requires consuming contaminated food and water, breathing infected cysts of the protozoa (The protozoa cannot be exposed with air in 5 seconds of exiting the body before dying.) and interacting with bodily fluids of the dead except blood.

The behavior of the Plasgils are usually homicidal insanity and when they're dying, they try to reach to the nearest source of water to spread their infection.

Is anyone here in this thread?

No.

I'll be back; I'm a bit busy at the moment.

Thank you,

Basically, a protozoa that looks and acts the way you say it does is so absurdly abnormal that it would be immediately caught out as the culprit. The replication is especially problematic - the human body is actually pretty good about kicking out intruders, and that process is often through the symptoms you described earlier, so as earlier generations of the protozoa die off they're ejected out as feces, urine, snot, saliva, pus, etc. and their abnormally high presence will be detected by someone with a microscope. If you're shooting for realism, you'd have start over from where you were in the first post, because P. Kegilaan has gone past Artistic License (no such thing as an "innocent" protozoa infection) and straight into Dan Brown at this point.

Again - why are the teens engaging the zombies. You keep saying that they are or they will, but since the outbreak is infection-based, active engagement only increases the risk to them. Unless the teens have a good reason to keep going back into the lion's den, it defies suspension of disbelief that they would keep doing it.

Conflagration may not mean what you think it does. Depending on how you define firelight, it's probably possible to replicate those lumens with a few powerful flashlights focused on a target. (And/or live somewhere near the poles where the Earth's rotation causes day to be longer. Like Antarctica.)

An EDM concert would come in at, what, 120 decibels? That's an amount that can be fairly easily replicated and directed - and regularly is, which is why noise pollution ordinances exist.

Then what? I'm shooting for ultraviolent bio-horror story, not a realistic story. I don't know how does the kids in the story survive that and I don't even bother how to makes this disease be effective without resorting to Idiot Ball.

The funniest things is that most of the children and teenagers in this protozoa zombie apocalypse become violent gangs of children gathered in places like power plants, office buildings and other places in the city and this case in the quarantine zone town of North Park, class divides in the quarantine areas divided between Eden and Sodom.

edited 15th Jul '16 6:31:49 PM by Huthman

If you don't care about making your story realistic, then there's no point trying to justify it with this protozoa nonsense. All that's going to do is set up the expectation that your story actually cares about realism, followed by frustration and disappointment on the part of your audience when they discover that's not the case.

It would be better to just nail down what your zombies do, and stick to that, without explaining "why".

edited 17th Jul '16 2:13:10 AM by Tungsten74

Maybe.

I think if I was writing this, I'd go with a microscopic hive-mind extraterrestrial invasion. The Kegi would be a single entity spread out over trillions of cells, which are each autonomous enough to infect ("invade", really) a living host in a group. [Insert some jargon about t-cell absorption and cancerous mimicry in the host's tissue here.]

...The main problem with using P. Kegilaan is, again, that you had it working in a way that would not realistically lead to a zombie apocalypse story without massive suspension of disbelief. The only symptom you need for an infection-based zombie apocalypse to happen is a zombie transformation, yeah? Then why bother with any of the rest?

Well, not quite. You want a violent teen story happening during a zombie (post?)apocalypse, am I understanding that correctly? Well here's the problem with that: that order is specific, and you came up with an explanation for the zombification but have yet to justify the violence among the survivors. The zombies are obviously not going to be viewpoint characters, but you justified their situation and let the actual characters slip. The zombies have a motivation, which is to survive (maybe the same for the infecting agent); what motivates the teens?

So here's what I suggest, if you're serious about actually writing a story in this setting: the infection affects people differently, even though it initially seems to only have one symptom. The majority of those infected become zombies by some definition or another, and a minority has their thinking affected without really noticing it. This affected thinking takes the form of unusual aggression. This is not "unusually high aggression", just a increased baseline of emotion that can be easily seen as a reaction to the situation without anyone thinking that it's due to the infection. It's the kind that wouldn't be out of place in your average teenager except for how regular it is when it wasn't there before.

P. Kegilaan is still highly infectious, and in fact spread far more widely and over a longer period of time than you initially suggested before the zombification started happening. As with protozoa infections in the real world, you have to catch them before they start doing more permanent damage: the infection can be cured, but the permanent damage it causes is exactly that. This way, the usual UN-WHO methods of containment barely work (they prevent the spread of a disease, but are less effective at stopping sudden outbreaks because logistics takes time to get going) and the situation appears increasingly hopeless. Violence begins to make more sense in this kind of setting.

Now. Does that work?

Yeah, I like it. Thanks for the bizarre stuff that I had to write.

A lot of "zombie" infection stories skip straight to the outbreak, to get around questions like how exactly it spread, and you can still get around that question but, if you're willing to write two stories, there is another way of getting around it.

A preceding conflict or disaster, in the same setting, totally unrelated to the zombie mess, that a lot of resources are dedicated to. At some point, someone makes comment about a type of animal like microbe never seen before, but it quickly dies due to air exposure and is not discussed further because it turns out to be unrelated to the current crisis, only to suddenly become the focus of the next book, albeit from the perspective of different characters, with an almost throwaway reference to the last book's characters mentioning they hadn't realized just how widespread it was.

One disaster isn't really the best justification for not noticing another, but readers don't tend to think that way, at least not until several trips to the fridge, and you'll be seen as clever, or at least more clever than "most" zombie infection authors, but actually setting up the outbreak rather than saying uh yeah, prions in cows got in people, spread like wildfire, almost no one left.

Also, the planet is big. The plague doesn't have to necessarily hit the whole globe. If it takes most of and causes massive collapse in southern Asia, that's still a very big problem for Southern Asians. Just tell the story of the teenagers there and you've still got your violent gangs.

edited 29th Aug '16 4:07:29 AM by IndirectActiveTransport