IT'S OFFICIAL: There is no zombie apocalypse. The United States' Centres for Disease Control and Prevention made this extraordinary statement after a spate of cannibalism incidents hit the news.

"CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms)", agency spokesman David Daigle told the Huffington Post on Friday.

This is not the first time the CDC has addressed zombies. In the past, the government agency has released several tongue-in-cheek warnings about the undead.

Now, however, the CDC decided to weigh in on the zombie question in earnest following a vicious attack that happened in Miami last week, when Rudy Eugene, aged 31, was shot and killed by police while devouring the face of a homeless man.

The victim, 65-year-old Ronald Poppo, survived, but the incident has left his face horribly disfigured.

Eugene, who may have been high on drugs known as bath salts at the time, seemed invulnerable to the bullets piercing his naked body until the moment he collapsed, police said.

On Tuesday, Alexander Kinyua, a 21-year-old student from Maryland, admitted to murdering his roommate, Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, and then eating his heart and parts of his brain.

Now, law enforcement officials are on the hunt for Luka Rocco Magnotta, a porn actor who allegedly killed and dismembered Jun Lin, a Chinese man believed to be his lover, and then raped and ate flesh from the corpse.

He allegedly packaged and mailed other body parts to political offices in Ottawa, Canada, the Daily Mail has reported.

media_camera From left: Rudy Eugene, 31, was shot while eating the face of a homeless man in Miami. Luka Rocco Magnotta allegedly killed, raped and ate his lover in Ottowa. Alexander Kinyua, 21, killed his roommaate and ate his heart and brain.

The gruesome parade of crimes involving cannibalism has continued with a man in Sweden who allegedly cut off and ate his wife's lips, followed by a story out of New York where a man chewed the ear off another man at a Staten Island restaurant.

It also has been reported that in New Jersey, a man stabbed himself multiple times in front of police and then threw pieces of his skin and intestines at them.

All of the ghoulish crimes of the past week have driven Zombie Apocalypse up to the No. 2 spot on Google's list of trending search terms.

The site Gawker has added fuel to the fire by pointing to a "mysterious rash" that broke out at a high school in Hollywood, Florida, as further proof that the walking dead are out there.

The CDC spokesperson dismissed "fictional viruses" that can cause cannibalism in humans, such as Ataxic Neurodegenrative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome, which has been outlined by a Harvard University professor in a fake medical journal.

However, zombie-like characteristics have been observed in the animal kingdom. A newfound fungus in a Brazilian rain forest - called Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani - is known to infect an ant, take over its brain so as to move the body to a good location for growth, and then kill the host.

The fascination with the idea of corpses coming back to life to feast on the brains of the living is not new. In 1932, Victor Halperin directed White Zombie, where Bela Lugosi played a voodoo master, setting the stage for eight decades of B-list horror films centering on flesh-eating ghouls.

The 1968 film Night of the Living Dead has become a classic of the genre and a cult favorite.

Most recently, the zombies appeared on the small screen in AMC's show The Walking Dead, which has been favourably received by the audience and the critics alike, reanimating the classic horror theme.

Originally published as Face eating isn't the zombie apocalypse