The popular video game-turned-HBO show “The Last of Us” is about a zombie apocalypse in which the zombies become infected by a fungus that controls a person's brain and mutated due to warming temperatures.
So, is it possible that fungus that was harmless to humans before could get us sick now?
“I think that that's been a concern as temperatures slowly rise that organisms that haven't been particularly dangerous to humans could emerge and become you know more virulent,” Dr. Peter Pappas, an infectious disease specialist at University of Alabama Birmingham, told KNX In Depth.
Dr. Pappas said while there’s no fungus that can infect a human being and turn them into a zombie, he noted the writers actually got the idea from real life fungus.
“So years ago they discovered an organism that at that time was called cordyceps,” Dr. Pappas explained.
“It's now called ophiocordyceps unilateralist. But what it is…it's a real life fungus that infects certain ants and spiders in tropical areas. The ants, you know, ingest the score or they inhale it. I'm not sure how they actually come in contact with it, but it's one or the other and gradually the fungus germinates, and then it takes over the body and it, you know secretes a chemical that many scientists say is kind of like a hallucinogen. The ant then crawls up onto an area as its dying.”
Dr. Pappas said the ant typically crawls up to a lead where it “jaws latches jaws into the vein of the leaf where there’s, you know, continuous flow of nutrients and gradually as the ant dies over the next several days.”
Listen to the full interview in the audio above.
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