Voodoo and Zombie ! (A new explaination)

An ex­pla­na­tion for “voodoo zom­bie­fi­ca­tion,” a prod­uct of Hai­tian folklo­re sug­gests that zom­bies arise when a sor­cer­er places an evil spell on an en­e­my. Some re­search­ers re­viewed the case of a Hai­tian ad­o­les­cent who was pro­nounced dead by a lo­cal doc­tor af­ter a week of great con­vul­sions.Af­ter the boy was bur­ied, he re­turned in an in­co­her­ent state, and Hai­tians said a sor­cer­er had re­s­ur­rec­t­ed him as a zom­bie. Scientists attribute the incident to a tox­ic sub­stance called tetrodotox­in, found in a puffer­fish breed na­tive to Hai­tian wa­ters. Con­tact with the sub­stance gen­er­al­ly re­sults in rap­id death. How­ev­er, in some cases, the right dose pro­duces a state that mim­ics death and slows vi­tal signs to un­mea­s­ur­a­ble lev­els. Even­tu­al­ly, the vic­tim snaps out of the death-like co­ma. Anal­y­sis has shown that ox­y­gen dep­ri­va­tion could ex­p­lain the boy’s brain dam­age and in­co­her­ent state, Ef­thi­mi­ou said: thus, “it would seem that zom­bie­fi­ca­tion is noth­ing more than a skill­ful act of poi­son­ing.”
from worldscience