Wall Street Journal, Friday, March 20, 2015, MANSION section, Spread Sheet, Page M12:
(and F.Y.I.:  http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2011/05/18/cdc-advises-on-zombie-apocalypse-and-other-emergencies/ )

SPREAD SHEET

Zombie Apocalypse? Where to Hide

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a statistical model for simulating the spread of a fictional zombie epidemic

By

ADAM BONISLAWSKI

March 19, 2015 11:46 a.m. ET

21 COMMENTS

ILLUSTRATION: TAMER KOSELI

Just a word of friendly advice—if you ever find yourself in the midst of a zombie outbreak, steer clear of Scranton, Pa.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a statistical model for simulating the spread of a fictional zombie epidemic. Detailed in a study submitted to the scientific-paper repository arXiv, the model identifies northeastern Pennsylvania as the U.S. location most at risk of being overrun by the undead.

To develop the model, scientists in Cornell’s physics department broke down the U.S. population in a grid of roughly 3-kilometer-square boxes. They then built upon classic epidemiological models of infectious-disease transmission—measles, the flu and the like—to simulate a marauding band of undead ravaging the country.

What locales might those worried about zombies want to avoid? Highly populated areas are a bad bet in general, of course. ButAlexander Alemi, a graduate student and one of the authors of the paper, notes that the most susceptible spots change over time.

ENLARGE

Seven days after the initial outbreak, lower Manhattan, with the map’s highest population density at 299,616 people, has the highest zombie susceptibility. In fact, the New York City metro area in general is probably best avoided, as are other large cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.

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By 28 days out, however, the pattern has shifted, Mr. Alemi says. Instead of individual cities being at the greatest risk, areas located between multiple major cities are most vulnerable. “You start to see interactions between different cities,” he says. While northeastern Pennsylvania, identified in the paper as the country’s most vulnerable region, “doesn’t have a particularly high population itself, it is near all these other high population areas.”

This means that were a zombie outbreak to start in any of these nearby cities—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.—the creatures would have a high probability of finding their way to northeastern Pennsylvania, which puts the area at especially high risk, Mr. Alemi notes.

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Also a bad bet—Bakersfield, Calif., which sits uncomfortably near San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The best spots for riding out a zombie apocalypse are sparsely populated areas of Montana and Nevada, which remain untouched even four months in, note Mr. Alemi and his co-authors.

The subject matter is completely hypothetical, of course. But the Cornell team’s zombie simulation could have applications for modeling real-life outbreaks, Mr. Alemi says.

Undead in Sligo, Ireland Origin of Dracula by Bram Stoker ?!

AUTHOR: Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, whose mother was from Sligo.

Origin of Dracula ?! = Sligo, Ireland =Bram Stoker's Mother

Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, May 18, 2014, TRAVEL section, Page N1, Excerpt from "Yeats Rising" by Raymond M. Lane:


"On West Garden Street (Sligo, Ireland), Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley (Bram Stoker's mother) used to wash the family clothes in the river there.  The cholera epidemic was so bad in 1832 that authorities rushed the dead to the cemetery - so fast, the rumor started that living people were being buried.
'The well-off started putting little bells on the headstones,' said guide John Paul Ryan, who with his son Ben does the free history walk around town.  'A string was attached to the deceased's wrist, and if they woke up in the casket, they could ring for help.'
'We call it the 'escape clause' he deadpanned.
But, in fact, the bell did ring sometimes during high winds, 'and you can imagine the horror,' he said.  'Charlotte was Stoker's mother, and it was she who told him about the 'undead' - which was the working title of his gothic horror novel DRACULA.
'Forget Transylvania,' he joked.  'It's all Sligo laundry-day yarns.'"

From sligoweekender.ie:

About 1000 people died in Sligo during the 1832 cholera epidemic, roughly 50 each day of the epidemic.  Carpenters ran out of wood for coffins and people had to be buried in sheets.

"Nothing Personal: (Cannibals) Want To EAt You" & Replace Zombies

New York Times, Sunday Review (The Opinion Pages), October 27, 2013, Page SR 7:

NEWS ANALYSIS

Nothing Personal: They Want to Eat You

By ERIK PIEPENBURG

Published: October 26, 2013

ZOMBIES may be hogging the pop culture spotlight these days in “World War Z” and “The Walking Dead,” but now that the flesh-eating undead are selling Sprint cellphones in television ads, one has to wonder: have they finally jumped the shark as the monster of the moment?

Enlarge This Image

Kris Mukai

Well, there’s a new wave of evildoers waiting to step in: cannibals.

At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Eli Roth’s hungry-savages film, “The Green Inferno,” and Manuel Martín Cuenca’s dark love story “Cannibal” played to gore-loving crowds. Other releases this fall include “Butcher Boys,” an urban thriller based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical 18th-century essay “A Modest Proposal”; “The Colony,” about flesh-eating survivors of an apocalyptic attack; “We Are What We Are,”about a father and his cannibal children; the German-language “Cannibal Diner,” with young women on the menu; and “Evil Feed,” a comedy about a restaurant that serves the body parts of losing participants in an underground fighting ring.

On the small screen, NBC’s crime drama “Hannibal,” based on Thomas Harris’s notorious flesh muncher Hannibal Lecter, will return for a second season. And two plays (both closing this weekend) brought cannibalism to the stage: In New York, “feeling” told the story of a woman who talks with Jeffrey Dahmer; in Minneapolis, “Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals” took a comic-book approach to the subject.

So what’s behind this burst of fascination with flesh eating?

For Mr. Roth, the director of “Hostel” and an expert on pushing the boundaries of horror, the fear of cannibals “is not just having your own flesh devoured, but that you would have a taste for another person’s flesh. It’s a primal feeling.”

The tag line for “The Green Inferno,” showing on Nov. 2 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies series, is, “The only thing more terrifying than Mother Nature is human nature.”

Gunnar Hansen, who played the weapon-wielding Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974), a pioneering foray into cannibalistic terrain, sees it as a sign of the times, just as the cold war gave rise to fever dreams of space invaders and Vietnam ushered in a modern zombie era with “Night of the Living Dead.”

“You can look at the economy and say the past is about to bite us literally and figuratively,” said Mr. Hansen, whose new memoir is called “Chain Saw Confidential.” “We are at the point where a new generation has nothing to look forward to.”

Or perhaps there’s something more visceral at work. Another early favorite of horror cognoscenti — and an inspiration for Mr. Roth’s “Green Inferno” — is Ruggero Deodato’s“Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), about a documentary crew that’s attacked by the flesh-eating tribe they are filming in the Amazon. Its depiction of real-life animal slaughter, which still shocks today, suggests a weird affinity with today’s animal-rights’ movement.

“People rarely think of steak or fried chicken as consuming a dead thing,” said Tim Kelly, who writes about the cannibal genre for Cinematallica.com. “Cannibals force you to confront something you don’t want to understand, which is the truth of what you are consuming.”

Then again, maybe it was just a matter of time before pop culture caught up with real-life reports of cannibalism, like the case of a New York police officer who was convicted in March for a plot to kill and eat women.

And there’s always the possibility of shock fatigue. “Ten years ago nobody would laugh at a movie about eating people,” said Aaron Au, a co-writer of “Evil Feed.” “But the zombie genre desensitized us to be accepting of it.”

On another, even creepier, level, what sets cannibals apart from zombies may simply be their humanity. As Kimani Ray Smith, the director of “Evil Feed,” put it: “A cannibal’s just a smarter zombie. You need more cunning to get away with being a cannibal. But cannibals still have day-to-day problems. They still have to pay the rent.”

Erik Piepenburg is an editor in the culture department of The New York Times.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on October 27, 2013, on page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Nothing Personal: They Want to Eat You