Zombies and syphilis: a myth to explain a disease?

Zombies have long been a fascination for Americans. From Night of the Living Dead to Walking Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Jane Austen and Zombies to Zombie Apocalypse, the zombie subculture is “alive” and kicking into the millennium. Zombies have infiltrated everything from movies to books to video games to cocktails to cartoons to gangs. Every October, Zombie Crawls is celebrated when people dress up as zombies to shuffle and stagger from bar to bar to drink zombies. This zombie phenomenon is not limited to Halloween. This spring, a 5K charity race is scheduled in which runners have the added incentive of crossing the finish line quickly as they will be chased by, you guessed it, zombies.

Zombies are believed to have originated in the Afro-American Haitian culture. Driven by macabre voodoo rituals, dark magic revived the dead to do the bidding of those who summoned them. These walking corpses shuffled forward with forced steps. The flesh rotted from their bodies and their minds could no longer formulate rational thoughts.

What does all this have to do with sexually transmitted diseases? Good question. The answer may surprise you.

In 1492, Europeans brought smallpox, bubonic plague, venereal diseases, and religion to the New World. The New World returned the favor with syphilis.

Late stage, tertiary syphilis is syphilis that has not been treated. Spirochetes are microscopic worm-like organisms. Throughout the disease, they multiply by the millions and lodge in most major organs, including the brain. The human body stoops and ages rapidly. Symptoms of late-stage syphilis include a staggering, staggering gait, large oozing sores, loss of tissue such as the tip of the nose, and moments of euphoria followed by anger. In other words, late-stage syphilis and zombies share many of the same traits.

Zombies originated in the New World just like syphilis. Myths develop to explain the otherwise inexplicable. In this case, the zombie myth developed to explain syphilis, an incurable and deadly disease in the pre-penicillin era. Although syphilis is now treatable, it took more than 450 years to find a cure.

While the myth of zombies may have arisen as a way to explain disease, modern culture has embraced zombies. michaeljackson,suspense video of dancing zombies, remains the number one best-selling album of all time in the United States. In 2010, Asbury Park, New Jersey set the Guinness Zombie Walk World Record with 4,093 official participants.