I've been thinking about the possible science of a Zombie virus for years, and I've looked at many sources, this is what I came up with.
First of all, a parasite would be unable to cause this type of infection, especially if we are looking at a Max Brooks style Zombie, it would be too difficult to spread and survive.
The name for my supposed virus is taken from the Resident Evil T-virus, I will now explain.
The T-virus gets it's name because of the human immune system, which is made up in part of specialized cells called T-cells and B-cells. While there are many types of both cells, their main functions are as thus. T-cells identify bodily invaders, and B-cells destroy them, in a nutshell. The only way for a virus to be "incurable" is for it to bypass the anti-bodies created by B-cells. Similar to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV which shuts down the immune system, so does the T-virus. The T-virus gets its name for it's main target, the T-cell. The virus attacks, and spawns inside of T-cells, but, what is remarkable about the virus, is that it does not simply destroy the T-cell, it mutates it. While the virus is inside the cell, a series of changes occur because of the exposure to the virus's DNA. The T-cells no longer can recognize the virus as an invader, and tell the B-cells to target normally healthy organs. In this respect, it is much like cancer, and can be often mistaken as such, except that it does not create tumours. After the virus has replicated, the T-cell dies.
Meanwhile, B-cells are destroying the human body from the inside out, it primarily targets the areas that receive the most blood flow, the heart and brain. First, the heart dies, this "kills" a person in a similar fashion to a heart attack, which was a common image of those who died in Max Brooks's World War Z. Once the person is dead, however, the virus lives on.

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