The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants citizens to use their brains lest they get eaten by packs of marauding zombies.
Well, sort of.
This week, the CDC launched a slick new media campaign that uses the tongue-in-cheek hypothetical scenario of a zombie apocalypse to teach the basics of emergency preparedness.
“There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example,” reads a note on the CDC’s website. “You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.”
The CDC site gives a quick history of zombies, from their historical origins in Haitian folklore to their modern place in pop culture. From there, it offers guidelines on how to prepare for the a zombie plague, such as what supplies to include in an emergency kit. While the CDC pegs its advice to a zombie attack, it also notes how the same advice should be followed to prepare for other emergencies.
So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen? First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored).
The campaign even includes some macabre promotional images urging people to prepare for the worst:
If in the future you find yourself wholly unprepared while the undead overrun your town, you can’t say the CDC never warned you.
