Human Zombies (Score 5, Interesting)

This reminds me of a bit of research done by the psychofarmacology department of the University of Rotterdam in the late eighties. They set out to discover if there was any substance to the reports from aid-workers and missionaries in Africa that 'zombies' were for real. Several well-documented cases existed, involving 'dead' individuals returning to their old villages, months or years after their burial, with only hazy memories of what happenend during their time away. With some help from anthropologists it was discovered that the 'zombies' were in fact poisoned with a complex witch-doctor mix of herbs and toxins, the only really important ingredient of which was a powerful neurotoxin of animal origin, which inhibited active thought and the forming of memories. The individual who was doused in this contact-poison would fall into a death-like coma soon afterwards. Then it was simply a matter of digging the body up fast and whacking it over the head a few times to get the person to wake up. If that failed (hitting the proper dosage is a bitch), the grave could be closed, no one the wiser. The 'lucky' ones woke up as addled 'zombies', with no will of their own and able to hear and obey simple instructions and could be sold as slaves. The toxin was recreated by science (without the unnecessary extra ingredients) and proved quite powerful when tested on lab-rats. The neurotoxin blocked key neural pathways, but turned out to be easily 'washed away' by a sufficiently large dose of Na+ ions, such as when the victim ingested common table-salt. Having proved that it there was a scientific truth to the zombie-myth, but finding no easy synthesis of the neurotoxin nor any medical use, the research group moved on. I was given their report while in high-school by one member of the team, who thought it was funny that I was VERY interested in this voodoo-zombie story that she had mentioned to me. I should go look up that report or contact her again for further details, but perhaps someone who is more skilled in research and farmacology can just pull this out of a database for all of us?