Original subtitles

A disease that turns men into monsters.

A medical establishment on the verge of collapse.

A world consumed by fear.

Could a real life zombie apocalypse wipe humanity from the face of the globe?

This would be a virus that could cause civilization to collapse.

Leading minds join forces to craft scientifically plausible scenarios of

Armageddon.

And find the secret to human salvation in the

face of ultimate disaster.

Let's drop him in.

We're in.

Okay.

A lot of us have the impression that human beings have tamed Earth.

That we are the masters of this planet.

That, however, is an illusion.

We're in tight.

Good? Good. Now come on up here.

An illusion that's pretty easily revealed when you look at what's

right now in the field of infectious disease.

Coming up on the morning. Grab the buoy. We are in an era of many emerging

infectious diseases, and by that I mean diseases that we have never come into

contact with or diseases that we have come into contact with but are appearing

in some different way.

They are increasing in frequency for some reason, and this is a huge problem.

Looks like a humpback to me.

These viruses can emerge from totally unexpected sources.

Getting so close.

We have no protection against them.

There's no question. An unexpected virus that we have no immunity against, where

there's no vaccines available, this kind of virus.

Should emerge into the population.

Yeah, it shouldn't be in the harbor unless it's sick.

This would be a nightmare scenario for the world.

In a tragic incident this morning.

A humpback whale attacked a sailboat in Provincetown Harbor, killing a 48 -year

-old sailing instructor and his 19 -year -old students.

The whale then swam in circles for two hours before beating itself.

The Massachusetts Department of Fish and Wildlife, assisted by teachers and

students from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, are now performing a

This whale attacked a sailboat, which is very unusual.

So we're hoping to find a clue to that behavior, especially in the brain of the

whale.

One theory is that the whale may have been suffering from an illness that

affected its behavior.

Where do new diseases come from?

There are several sources, but one of the most common is from other species.

The animal kingdom.

These are referred to as zoonotic diseases.

We have many dramatic diseases that have come into the human population,

usually from other species.

Ebola is one that's very famous. SARS, which spread a little bit more, which

originated probably in bats. We were almost certain about that.

When we think about zoonotic diseases, diseases that are spread from animals,

think about some kind of transmission path, the person and the animal coming

direct contact.

So is there a scenario where people are dissecting a whale which has died

on a beach?

Could someone then become infected, especially if a person has cuts?

Absolutely, there would be a way.

Well, it's a messy process.

I got a small cut on my finger, but that happens.

So what would a doomsday virus look like?

Well, there is one virus that stands out. If it was just changed or mutated

slightly, it wouldn't just cause the death of millions of people, but it

create a virtual army.

Of zombie -like victims.

It would be the ultimate doomsday infection.

That virus is rabies.

Rabies is a virus that infects all mammals.

No other virus does this, has such a wide range of

hosts that it can infect.

It's usually spread by the bite of an animal that's infected.

The scary thing about the virus is it really heads towards the nervous system.

Once the rabies virus gets into a nerve cell, it redirects the function of the

cell to start replicating the virus.

Slowly but surely...

You get viral replication up through all of the nerves into the spinal cord in

the brain.

Almost everybody who shows signs of the disease we call rabies dies.

It's essentially a death sentence.

The brain cells that regulate the muscles of breathing basically are

and your...

paralyzed and not able to breathe, and that's the method of death.

The speed with which rabies kills people is terrifying.

What's also terrifying is what happens to rabies victims before they die.

In many ways, rabies is a kind of zombie -like or zombie -making disease because

it eats the brain.

When it hits the brain, that's when the problems begin.

That's when the symptoms begin.

Anxiety ridden, hallucinations, foaming at the mouth, people as well as animals.

The animal now attacks other animals. The animal becomes vicious.

When rabies starts to destroy cells that are responsible for inhibiting

aggressive behavior, anything can happen.

So why don't we hear more about rabies? Why isn't rabies a virus that makes us

scared?

Firstly, it's not transmitted easily. You have to be bitten. You have to be

scratched. You have to have an animal slobber on you who has rabies. Then you

can catch the virus.

But what if rabies changed or mutated?

What if the virus somehow developed the ability to spread more easily?

But not just through bodily fluids like saliva, but through the air.

That would change everything.

This is what scientists worry about.

I mean, this would be a virus that could cause civilization to collapse.

Is rabies the most dangerous virus on the planet?

It's only not considered the most dangerous virus because it's not

easily.

If a new strain of rabies developed, one that could be transferred through the

air, that could be the deadliest virus this planet has ever seen.

Where's the other one?

It's right over here.

They're both suffering from the same symptoms.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but... This could be rabies.

Two people detained yesterday by Falmouth police were found dead in their

this morning. They had been arrested separately on charges of disorderly

conduct.

Autopsies are currently underway to determine the cause of death.

To diagnose rabies, you actually have to be thinking of it, because you have to

use special stains to look at it in the brain, or you have to culture it in

special media to see if you have the virus.

If you look in the brain of rabies patients in autopsy,

you can see deposits of virus where the

virus has actually been growing and obviously destroyed cells in the brain.

Autopsy results have revealed that the man and woman found dead in the Falmouth

jail Tuesday morning had been infected with the rabies virus.

A medical investigation is now underway to determine how they contacted the

disease and what connection, if any, there is between the two cases.

We've done a great job of controlling rabies in the Western world.

So if two people contracted rabies at the same time, alarm bells would go off.

One of the first things that would happen is that public health officials

look for the common links between the two cases.

It's incredibly important to figure out exactly what the source was because you

need to prevent other people from getting sick.

Just basic detective work, trying to find people who may be infected or may

been exposed by interviewing, finding out who they were in contact with.

Since the diagnosis is made after death, you would probably have to be talking

to the family members to find out what the patient's been doing.

We ask them tons of questions, and we try to figure out a common source.

Rabies, as far as we know, infects all mammals.

That includes mammals on land, and it includes mammals in the water.

We know marine mammals, such as seals, have contracted rabies before.

Whales have never tested positive for the virus.

But under the right circumstances, it's certainly possible that they could.

Where could a new, more contagious version of the rabies virus come from?

Viruses change all the time in nature, but there's another way that they can

change.

And that is by our own hands.

Human beings manipulate disease -causing agents in laboratories all the time.

Some of these experiments have led to great medical achievements, like

or even in the fight against cancer.

Cancer killing viruses.

There are many labs who are working on this, and it's very successful right

This is why viruses are mainly genetically engineered today.

But there are also experiments that make viruses more dangerous and more deadly.

And those are the kind that can create an end -of -the -world scenario.

Those experiments really do happen, probably more often than we'd like to

All of the work we do with infectious diseases obviously can save many lives,

but could also be twisted by people who may want to use it for harming others.

Any technology can be used for both good and nefarious purposes.

After the Second World War, Britain, the former Soviet Union, the United

States, they all had some form of biological weapons program.

Then, in the early 1970s, The Biological Weapons Convention outlawed these types

of experiments, but that didn't mean it stopped.

The Soviets just continued in secret.

They developed this huge network of labs that they called biopreparate.

Something like 30 ,000 employees continued to produce bioweapons in these

For years, they kept this all secret, but in 1979, there was an accident.

Anthrax spores leaked out of one of the labs into the surrounding community.

More than 60 Soviet citizens died.

It was the worst known human anthrax outbreak in history.

It was simple human error that caused that anthrax outbreak.

But who's to say that someone else's human error wouldn't cause an even worse

outbreak?

Even with strict precautions in place, there are many ways materials like this

can escape a controlled environment.

You can't safeguard 100 % of the time, not when people are involved and

can be made.

Take a deadly transmissible agent.

Add the possibility of human error, and you now have the recipe for the worst

disease outbreak we've ever seen.

What's up, Dave?

Hey, what's up, David? How you feeling, man?

At this point, a genetically modified virus, deadly and easily spread, has

its way out of the lab and into the environment. A virus, modified and so

that it now threatens to extinguish the entire human race.

People wouldn't just get sick and die. They could transform into zombie -like

madmen, spreading violence along with the disease.

If the rabies virus developed a way to be transmitted from person to person.

That would be an apocalyptic catastrophe.

So if someone were to modify rabies to make it easier to spread between people,

how would they do it?

This would have to be a virus that infected the upper respiratory tract.

And this would be done by making it transmitted through aerosols, through

coughing, through sneezing.

A great example of an airborne disease is influenza.

Influenza is spread incredibly easy from person to person. If you're standing

anywhere near somebody who has influenza, you can get it simply from

that comes out of their mouth when they're talking.

The act of normal human speech can carry thousands of germs just on the moisture

of your breath.

If rabies became transmissible like the flu, you'd have a killer cocktail on

your hands.

People will be coughing, sneezing, 100 ,000 virus particles get released into

the air.

Everybody in that room could potentially come down with rabies.

From a single event, one person can infect a lot of people, and they can go

to infect many, many, many people, and then they can go on to infect many, many

people.

The growth is exponential.

If rabies were to spread like that, it would spread without any kind of

restriction.

If you don't think it's possible, just look what happened during the flu

epidemic of 1918.

Millions of people died when the pandemic of 1918 occurred.

Probably as many as 100 million people died throughout the world.

From this one strain of the virus, in five weeks of this virus, more people

than died from the Black Plague.

More people died in five weeks than died in 25 years of HIV.

So if we had a version of the rabies virus that spread as easily as the flu,

would the medical establishment prevent a pandemic from happening?

Well, chances are they couldn't, because they probably wouldn't even know it was

happening. Rabies is a difficult virus to detect.

Before it reaches the brain, there are no symptoms. You feel perfectly normal.

During this phase, if the virus was able to be transmitted from person to

person, then you could potentially be transmitting this virus to people

even knowing that you had the virus.

And it could potentially take months before the first symptoms appear.

And until then, You would just be carrying on your normal life, subways,

airplanes, supermarkets.

So what will happen when the disease finally begins to show itself?

A person would first start experiencing flu -like symptoms.

You feel malaise. You feel tired. You feel like you have sort of a viral

infection. Then the virus would start manifesting its brain symptoms.

That's when the problems begin.

We've had five cases in the last hour. Fever, slight constipation, trouble

swallowing. They're highly agitated, yelling, screaming.

They won't distill. We don't know what to do.

I'm calling security.

Call the police.

I can imagine how natural cases of rabies would look like a zombie.

Please get out. The similarities are very interesting in the destruction of

brain, the way people's behavior changes.

And when you put a lot of people together, it's a very tragic thing to

Yes, hello, this is the ER. We cannot see any more patients tonight.

operators in Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, and other major North American

cities are overwhelmed tonight.

I'm so scared.

After a string of violent assaults led to an explosion of new cases of rabies.

Authorities are asking people not to approach anyone who could be rabid, even

friends and family.

This outbreak comes on the heels of an announcement that a highly contagious

airborne strain of the rabies virus has infected people in at least 18

countries. Some are calling it a... The media will get

right on top of this and report it. They'll have medical experts on.

There'll be reports from the CDC in Atlanta as to what's being done.

It's necessary in order to get people to do whatever can be done to slow the

infection and the hope would be to stop the infection.

But all of these things, unfortunately, will frighten people.

There's no cure for rabies. Once you develop symptoms, it's universally

But there is a vaccine.

The vaccine can prevent people from getting rabies infection.

But the rabies vaccine can also be used for something called post -exposure

prophylaxis. So even if you're exposed to the rabies virus, if you get the

vaccine in time, it can prevent infection and prevent the onset of

But once you have symptoms, even the first symptoms, that's it.

The only treatment now is make yourself comfortable because it's the end. You're

going to die.

We have arrived at a critical moment.

How many do you have in the hot zone?

Because we have this vaccine, one of the first things that public health

officials would do is to administer the vaccine to people who are exposed to the

rabies virus or at risk of being exposed to the rabies virus.

It's one thing to have an effective vaccine. It's quite another to be able

administer that vaccine to millions or even billions of people in a very rapid

fashion. Right now, they keep the number of doses pretty low. There are not that

many people who have the potential to become infected by rabies every year.

There's only...

A number of doses that range in the thousands.

Hospitals have a few doses. Clinics have a few doses.

The problem with the vaccine is, A, we don't have enough of it, and B, it takes

a while to produce.

Large amounts of rabies virus would have to be grown.

The virus would have to be isolated and inactivated.

Then it has to be formulated with stabilizers and preservatives. This

does not happen quickly.

We don't have much capacity for making a lot of vaccine. If there were a big

rabies outbreak, it would take literally months to be able to make a vaccine to

protect the uninfected.

But even once the vaccine is ready, you'll have a whole new set of problems

your hands.

When you're facing a mass illness, There are huge ethical and social problems

that come with it. First of all, who gets the vaccine if there's a limited

supply? I think

there's no question that there would be a panic

among people to try to get a hold of a vaccine.

Everyone wants to live. They're going to want their families to live.

These kinds of situations in which there's a limited amount of cure and a

huge number of people who need it never work out well for most people.

Remember, in this scenario, the rabies infecting the world isn't normal rabies,

but something created in a laboratory to be more transmissible and more deadly.

Would this virus be the same as the rabies strains that are now around?

Possibly not.

So that rabies virus would not be affected by the vaccine. People

who were vaccinated and thought they were protected would not be.

If they started dying from rabies, then this would amplify

the catastrophe.

close to 1 billion.

Several governments in Africa, South America, and Asia have simply ceased

functioning after officials fled their posts.

Fearing infection, vigilantes across the globe have taken it upon themselves to

execute rabies sufferers on Sunday.

The parties warn this does little to stem the tide of infection and is only

adding to the bloodshed.

So what could we do if the vaccination strategy failed?

We might turn to some of the oldest techniques in history for preventing

epidemics, quarantine and isolation.

But how do you quarantine a population of billions that has basically turned

into zombies?

What can we do at this point? There's a worldwide pandemic of our own

making. It's turning people into virtual zombies.

There's no vaccine. There's no cure.

What can we do now to save ourselves from extinction?

Please pay careful attention to this message. Now protect yourself and your

family.

There are two classic ways that we use to reduce the spread of infectious

diseases in populations.

The first method is quarantine, where people who may have been exposed to the

disease but are not yet showing symptoms have their movements restricted.

The second method is isolation, where people who have symptoms of the disease

are removed from the population to prevent further spread.

broadcast at least 32 countries have imposed strict quarantine restrictions

within their borders the u .s surgeon general is

asking anyone living in a community with even one reported rabies case to stay

indoors

Quarantine is when you put a person who's not yet sick, they're still well,

they've been exposed, you isolate them, you prevent them from going out.

The problem then becomes, those people can't go out to get food, those people

can't go out to do their laundry, those people can't go out to do anything.

Plans have to be made to make sure that those people are fed and they have

enough water to drink, clothes to wear.

It gets very, very hard to enforce because people don't like to be cooped

a long time.

I think that there's a philosophy that if you feel well, you are well. You

feel sick.

You don't think you are sick. You don't see the point of having to sit at home

for days.

But you could be sick and you could infect others.

If you have a virus that's easily transmitted from person to person, A

quarantine may very well not be effective.

That's been tried for influenza virus over the years.

It doesn't work.

And in this scenario, quarantining seemingly healthy individuals would

the easy part.

Trying to isolate people who are already showing symptoms would be even more

difficult.

Isolation is when you prevent somebody from going out who is known to have the

disease. Anyone who was identified as getting sick would have to be isolated

a central site. They would use things like VA hospitals or other government

facilities.

What you have to factor in now is that the people you're trying to isolate,

can be irrational and violent.

If the volume of sick people were heavy enough, they would overwhelm any

facility that was available, and there were agitated people who were not

adhering to their isolation, that system would break down.

As law enforcement fall prey to this illness, there'll be a breakdown of law

order in our society.

And that becomes a self -perpetuating, vicious cycle in which eventually

everything is destroyed.

With rabid people overflowing into the street, we're going to have to switch

strategies immediately.

There's always the possibility of reverse quarantine, where people who are

get together and keep out people who are sick.

There's a phrase called cordon sanitaire, which refers to the idea of

off an entire community, city, town from interaction with the outside world.

Nobody can go in and nobody can go out.

In 1918, during the famous Spanish flu, one town,

Gunnison, Colorado, actually decided that it did not want to have the flu

come.

So it posted armed guards.

Everybody stayed in town. No one had yet caught the flu, and no one was allowed

to leave. If they left, they were not allowed to come back.

Gunnison managed to escape the influenza, but those were very draconian

measures, very carefully enforced.

The problem is the ability to contain one...

cluster of people in one town may be very, very difficult.

Every community right now relies on every other community. To think that you

just band some of your neighbors together in an isolated place and

is, I think, very wishful thinking.

Good morning. Can I see some ID, please? Can you keep out people who are

infected? We're Joe Connor.

Joe Connor, good to go.

Thank you very much, sir. Please.

If infected people are showing signs of aggression, this is going to be a

difficult situation.

Now,

part of the problem in dealing with the infected is you have a mixed bag. People

at various stages of the disease.

Some might be semi -rational, while others might be hostile and

You're also going to have people that are sick, but don't realize they're

demanding food, shelter, and protection from a virus they already have.

Can we really create a rabies -free zone?

There is one unusual manifestation of rabies disease and it could prove useful

in establishing rabies -free zones.

There is one symptom that humanity could conceivably use to protect itself.

Everything we usually use to combat disease is failing in this scenario.

Vaccinations aren't working, isolation isn't working, quarantine isn't working.

So all we've got left is to try to keep the rabid people at bay, away from

healthy people.

And one way we might be able to do that successfully is by using water.

It's well documented that rabies infection causes hydrophobia, a fear of

We don't really know why, but because rabies infects nerve cells that control

the throat muscles, swallowing can become difficult and even painful.

It's this difficulty swallowing that causes people with rabies to foam at the

mouth.

This is because even swallowing saliva becomes difficult.

So it's very normal when you see water, you swallow to reflex.

But if you have trouble swallowing, then every time you see water and you can't

swallow, you become scared of water.

With mass quantities of water, you could conceivably prevent people with rabies

from entering communities, towns, buildings, anything like that.

Of course, there's no guarantee that this would work.

It is a long shot.

But hydrophobia is one of the most consistent and potent symptoms among

sufferers.

But even if the most successfully kept out rabid people, it might not be a

rabies -free zone because the virus might find a way to get in.

Transmission of rabies could occur in ways that we would never even think of.

Remember, infectious agents can mutate. Viruses have been known to change in the

wild during outbreaks.

As a virus mutates, we have no idea of where its limits could

be. You can imagine that it could become even more transmissible and it could

continue to jump species.

The real danger is that the virus could find its way into other species that we

can't control.

A virus like this could be carried by mosquitoes or ticks or mice. At that

point, the idea of isolation and quarantine would be much more difficult.

Once that happens, no place on Earth is safe from the virus.

After the virus finds its way into each rabies -free zone, you'd see the same

pattern over and over and over again.

and until humans are teetering on the verge of extinction.

So, is there really a chance of survival in this kind of rabid zombie

apocalypse?

There might be one hope for humanity to avoid extinction, something that's been

with us all along.

There may be some hope in a situation like this because of the phenomenon of

natural immunity.

Natural immunity is when an individual or some group are naturally immune

to a disease, meaning they can be exposed to it and they will not get

We all have resistance to different infectious diseases.

Some of these are genes that, you know, we were lucky enough to get from our

parents that may protect us.

About 10 % of northern Europeans are resistant to HIV. Even though they're in

the presence of the virus, they don't become infected.

They're not becoming infected because the virus doesn't have the ability to

into their cells.

Because their cells are different.

So what if there are a group of people alive today that are immune to rabies?

There is some suggestion that in the Peruvian rainforest, there are

some groups that are very isolated who have natural immunity to rabies.

They will not get sick when exposed to it. Part of their immune system is

somehow primed to fight off that infection.

If they have the antibodies to rabies, it means that they've been exposed to

virus. But they're still alive. They didn't get a vaccine, but they're alive.

Then, if you look hundreds of years in the future, the people who populate

the planet will all be descendants from these small pockets of people who manage

to live when everyone else dies.

Maybe humanity could get a second chance there.

I think we really need to feel humble in the face of the microscopic world.

Very shortly before the HIV epidemic, someone declared the war

on infectious diseases to be won. And I think that when we get too arrogant

about our ability to control the microscopic world, we are actually

disaster.

It's dangerous to think that we're invulnerable, and it's a healthy

consider how a series of events, none of them outlandish on their own, could

come together to threaten everything we know.

It's always valuable to imagine, to discuss and debate these worst -case

scenarios, because that is how we are going to prepare ourselves for whatever

the future may bring.