Your guide to zombie parasite journalism

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

In the past few weeks, there’s been a string of horrific tales of cannibalism and other zombie-esque behavior in the news. How to explain a handful of reports of people doing the unspeakable? One answer circulating around these days is that it must be parasites. And for some journalists, the question demands a call to the Centers for Disease Control to find out what they’re hiding from us!

1. Andy Campbell of the Huffington Post asked the CDC if some kind of zombie virus was to blame for the recent attacks. On June 1, he reported on HuffPo’s Politics page the following scoop:

“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” wrote agency spokesman David Daigle in an email to The Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post entitled Campbell’s hard-hitting investigation, “Zombie Apocalypse: CDC Denies Existence Of Zombies Despite Cannibal Incidents.” That’s perhaps the finest deployment of the word despite in the history of journalism.

The story, by the way, received 65,797 likes on Facebook.

More here.