The Last of Us begins many years in the past, on a tv speak present within the Sixties. A panel of specialists discusses the menace posed by novel viruses that might trigger a world pandemic. (The parallels to our personal world and time are laborious to overlook.) One of the specialists says he isn’t frightened a couple of pandemic, a minimum of from a virus. Such viruses, he explains, have been round for the reason that daybreak of time and new ones seem from time to time. And why they might end in important sickness and dying, mankind’s pure immunity ultimately adapts, and the pandemic ends.
What retains this explicit knowledgeable awake at night time are fungi.
Although they appear innocent to mankind — and a few fungi are fairly helpful to humanity — some strains of fungus may be fairly harmful and even parasitic. They latch on to a bunch and may exchange its tissue and even assume management of the host organism. Such fungi don’t assault individuals as a result of they can not survive in temperatures as excessive because the human physique. But, the talk-show visitor warns, if the planet had been to heat barely, and these fungi advanced to match a hotter planet, that might change. And if that occurred, there can be no therapy for such a fungal an infection, and even an opportunity of a remedy.
In 2003 (a minimum of throughout the fictional world of The Last of Us) that’s precisely what occurs. A mutated Cordyceps fungi begins infecting individuals world wide. Once contaminated, the victims principally flip into bloodthirsty zombies, hungering for human flesh and chasing after anybody who isn’t contaminated to fulfill their monstrous appetites. 20 years after that, the primary story of the HBO collection, based mostly on the favored PlayStation video video games, begins.
Obviously, the Cordyceps an infection zombies are fabricated, however the fungus itself is actual, and it can infect bugs in a approach not fully dissimilar to the best way it infects individuals on the present. In truth a particular number of Cordyceps referred to as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has the flexibility to create what are often known as “zombie ants”:
In carpenter ants, the fungus snakes its approach via the physique, taking management of their muscle tissues. Then, shortly earlier than its demise, the ant will depart the colony at sundown, discover a high-hanging leaf or department, and clutch it in its jaws. There, the ant hangs immobile till it dies and the fungus emits spores that rain down upon unsuspecting victims. That course of has earned it the nickname “zombie fungus.”
But what about zombie humans? It’s highly unlikely, but not entirely out of the realm of scientific possibility.
David Hughes, an entomologist and biologist (and an advisor on The Last of Us games), has said “people get fungal diseases all the time” particularly if they are immunocompromised. The question, he argued, is not whether a fungus might infect someone, it’s whether a fungus might have the ability to control someone’s behavior. And he pointed to historical examples where people have been given “convulsive deliriums” by eating rye tainted by fungus. (Mr. Hughes seems like a really fun guy.)
Hughes added:
The last case was in 1954, thereabouts, in France when somebody intentionally sold a load of grain to a small French town containing the fungus. Everybody went mad and some 12-year-old girl tried to kill her mother with a kitchen knife… so yes, consuming the fungus will drive you crazy, and getting infected is possible. But it jumping from ants to humans and then onward [to other people] … that probably requires too many [improbable] circumstances to happen.
In other words, it’s not 100 percent impossible, but it’s not particularly likely.
That said, Cordyceps zombies are not exclusive to The Last of Us. One year after the original Last of Us game was released, the novel The Girl With all the Gifts used a nearly identical premise to explain its zombie infection: Someone became infected with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, and it sparked a global infection and the breakdown of society. Like The Last of Us, The Girl With All the Gifts — which was adapted to a little-seen but very effective film in 2016 — is largely set decades later, when humanity’s few survivors are trying to find a cure for the fungal infection within a little girl who is infected but immune to its mind-controlling side effects.
Essentially, Cordyceps zombies are good science-fiction: They’re not real, but they’re built on enough real scientific principles and phenomena to make them plausible — and thus scary.
New episodes of The Last of Us premiere weekly on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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