Tales of zombies and dead dead in western hemisphere

A COUPLE of years ago I wrote about a fuzzy-haired Czech professor with a head full of brains who had discovered a virus that could get into a human mind and make its owner reckless, writes Damien Enright

An essential part of its normal lifecycle was in rats, which it made reckless so that they would be an easy prey for cats. Inside a cat, it could initiate the first stage of its development. So it reproduced itself, rat to cat, cat to rat, saecula saeculorum. That it sometimes ended up in a human was not part of the plan.

Unfortunately, having lodged in a human brain, it could steer the host into acts of fatal recklessness, such as running across a highway populated by fast-moving vehicles. This was something the professor, Dr Flegr, often did as a young man, and it was the memory of that insane behaviour that caused him to investigate it when he became a biologist at Charles University in Prague.