Residents in Bicester are being reassured that the town is not about to be decimated by cholera.

An alert about a feared pandemic of the killer disease - which claimed over 14,000 lives in the last major outbreak in Britain 150 years ago - was worringly included in the minutes of the town council's cemetery working party this week.

Referring to the cemetery supervisor, the report said: "He has been made aware of a possible cholera pandemic expected in the relatively near future and that advice had been issued to maintain space for this."

But a town council spokesman told the Oxford Mail the warning should have been about flu.