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

British cabinet minister has to remind people that zombies don't spread Ebola
(Image credit: iStock)

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."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.