# Night of the Living Dead Question - zombie bites

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/night-of-the-living-dead-question-zombie-bites/687377>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [April 30, 2014, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/night-of-the-living-dead-question-zombie-bites/687377 "2014-04-30T17:29:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2014, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/night-of-the-living-dead-question-zombie-bites/687377/41 "2014-05-05T00:23:57Z")

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> [@Superhal](#):
>
> Bites can’t be infectious because everybody is already infected. The “bites are poisonous” idea is more logical, because we don’t know if suddenly they grow venom sacs seconds after reanimating or their saliva suddenly changes into poison. But, we also do know that zombies can tell the difference between dead-infected and reanimated-infected because they don’t eat each other and in the first season, rubbing zombie (not plain corpse) guts over you makes you invisible.
> 
> Through this discussion, one logical theory is that the virus behaves similarly to the Andromeda strain, in that it is only dangerous in the absence of oxygen, e.g. a living body, and once the body dies, it goes through major changes that make it poisonous to living humans (which also would not make sense because it would act through saliva, and in the seconds where reanimation occurs it doesn’t seem to make sense that all the saliva is suddenly poisonous or replaced by poisoned saliva.)

It’s not the zombie virus that kills you; bites are lethal for a separate reason, most likely a host of bacteria and whatnot. The bites cause sepsis or whatever, and when you die, the virus does its thing. In The Walking Dead, Jim takes days to die of infection-like symptoms, and in Night of the Living Dead, the girl dies after developing a fever and slipping into a coma. In another movie which I can’t recall perfectly, the bite was shown with radiating, discolored veins leading from the wound, implying that the locus was infected. Zombie viruses being in the brain, I think we can conclude that the bite itself is lethal separate and apart from the reanimation cause.

Of course, the bites _also_ transfer the virus, but that’s void in universes where everyone is infected.

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