Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry is a bioterrorism thriller about a bioweapon that turns humans into zombies. It was published in 2009, and is the first of the Joe Ledger series.
The story follows a Baltimore detective who is recruited into the Department of Military Sciences (DMS) and has to fight terrorists and flesh-eating zombies created by a pathogen called "Sword of the Faithful". Sword of the Faithful is a parasite that infects the brain with Prion protein. DMS is very short-handed because "bravo" team and "charlie" Team were wiped out in an outbreak at a hospital, and the protagonist, Joe Ledger, is installed as the head of the new "Echo" Team. Meanwhile, a Middle East terrorist group led by El Mujahid is developing new, faster-acting strains of the disease. The funding for the new strains is coming from a pharmaceutical company called Gen2000.