The Martlet

TORONTO (CUP) — “I like zombies almost as much as I like math,” said Carleton University graduate student Philip Munz.

When he and classmates Ioan Hudea and Joe Imad had to come up with a paper topic to model the spread of an infectious disease, the idea of a global outbreak of zombies seemed too good to pass up.

Munz had the original idea after doing math homework while the TV in the background happened to be playing a zombie movie, says Robert Smith, the professor who assigned the paper.

“I think they thought I’d shoot their idea down, but I loved it from the get-go,” said Smith.

The paper demanded that students use mathematical models to present how a disease might be contained and treated within a given population.

Zombies, who are typically highly infectious, deadly and potentially world-ending, presented the perfect analysis point — and it even has some applications to the real world.

“We do briefly mention diseases with a dormant infection at the end. I was thinking of something like herpes, where you’re infected for life, but the virus mostly lives in the spine. The outbreaks of herpes infection could be akin to the dead coming back to life,” said Smith, who co-authored a later version of the paper with the students for publication.

“In fact, I borrowed the phrase ‘hit hard and hit often’ from the HIV literature, because that’s precisely what you need to do there,” he said.

For Munz, the fun is just beginning.

“This paper is a good example, I think, of the versatility and fun that people can have with math,” he said.

The paper offered three models for fighting off a zombie invasion:quarantine the zombies, cure the zombies and return them to their human form, or kill the zombies.

While spending the term researching zombies would be any student’s dream, Smith is quick to clarify that there is a real-world application of the cure model.

“In the world of [viruses] and cells, an infected cell treated with drugs could return to a healthy cell,” he said.

But it’s the biology behind this idea that matters.

“We take unfamiliar biology, in this case the dead coming back to life. Understand what the key factors are, create a model, analyze it, compare it with the biology, refine it, then introduce potential interventions in order to see which ones are likely to work,” Smith explained.

This is the exact process used on new diseases such as swine flu, he says.

Unfortunately for the undead, killing the zombies in vast numbers was the only effective way the team found to save humanity from total collapse — something most disease researchers would do their best to avoid in the real world.

But the students were shocked by the reception the paper received when it entered the wider world.

“I never thought that it would get noticed,” Munz said. “I figured that the only people who were going to read the publication would be academics.”

In fact, the paper will appear this fall in a book called “Infectious Disease Modeling Research Progress” — but that’s well after media around the world have had their bite of the story.

After advocating that the only true and proper way to deal with an outbreak of zombies is by “strategically destroying them at such times that our resources permit,” it seemed everyone was keen on reading more about the Ottawa-based students and their zombies.

News outlets across Canada and the U.S., and even in Korea, Italy, the UK and the Czech Republic, have latched onto the story, vaulting Munz and his colleagues into the international spotlight.

As with all widely-popular stories, however, the cynics weren’t far behind.

But from zombie fans ready to poke holes in the theories to libertarians afraid of a government-funded research project on zombies, the complaints were mercifully few.

“The major negative comments are from people desperately worried that we wasted taxpayer money on this,” Smith said. “Because, you know, the university was quite happy to fund us to go collect zombie specimens and to travel to exotic locations to observe zombies in the wild.”

But just because they wrote a widely-popular paper about zombies doesn’t mean the students were experts going into the writing process. Luckily, though, their professor was.

“When the students came in and showed me their first model, I could say, ‘Look, I’ve seen Shaun of the Dead and it doesn’t work like that. Gentlemen, you need to watch some movies this weekend,’” Smith said.