Image via WikipediaThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a blog post on its website regarding how to keep prepared for any "zombie apocalypse" in near future; it was a cheery attempt by the department to make more and more Americans to actually read about how to prepare for hurricanes. The blog post was so interesting that, owing to widely used social networks, it attracted record breaking internet traffic that the website even crashed, informed the department on Thursday. Originally the Zombie Apocalypse campaign was aimed to get support from social media, and a commendable effort of CDC's Public Health and Preparedness center to make more people aware of the upcoming start of hurricane season i.e. 1st of June, 2011. CDC is a federal government health agency headquartered in Atlanta.
The popular blog post initiates writing: "There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for." It goes on asserting "Take a zombie apocalypse for example. ... 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 blog was published only few days ahead of May 21, which is a predicted to be the “Judgment Day” by an evangelical broadcaster in California.
The spokesperson of CDC, Dave Daigle, stated on Thursday that "If you prepare for the zombie apocalypse, you'll be prepared for all hazards." The blog post goes very deep and identifies that the word ‘zombie’ is derived from voodoo practice of spirit possession, where the victims are stripped of consciousness. The post mentions that the ‘Zombies culture’ became popular, after immense success of the block buster horror movies like the one of George Romero “Night of the Living Dead." This movie was released in 1968 and showed the flesh-eating zombies wander about in the eastern seaboard after a disastrous radioactive contamination.
Daigle told that a random blog post of CDC blog post is expected to gate approximate page views of about 1,000 to 3,000. While the previous highest traffic record of a blog post was of 10,000 visits. He declared that despite their servers being down, this blog post had gathered 60,000 page views by the end of Wednesday. ‘Zombies Apocalypse’ also became the most trending topic worldwide on Twitter later on Thursday.
This campaign was actually targeted to the younger, media-savvy audience which the CDC posts do not see very often, reported Daigle.
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