British cabinet minister has to remind people that zombies don't spread Ebola


Zombies do a lot of things: They stagger around, creep people out, and eat brains. One thing they can't do, Britain's International Development Minister Desmond Swayne stresses, is give people Ebola.
Swayne told the House of Commons that "a constituent wrote to me saying he believed that Ebola was being spread by zombies, and I had to disabuse him of his belief in zombies," he said. "But the irony is that actually people are most infective when they're dead and one of the problems is that the burial traditions, which involve intimate skin-to-skin contact and the washing of bodies, are highly infectious."
Swayne had some good news to share on that front: Officials from the UK helped set up 83 burial teams in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and now 100 percent of Ebola victims in the city are being buried within 24 hours, helping slow down the spread of the disease.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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