{"id":188024,"date":"2023-01-16T09:59:06","date_gmt":"2023-01-16T09:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/how-realistic-is-the-last-of-uss-fungus-outbreak\/"},"modified":"2023-01-16T09:59:06","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T09:59:06","slug":"how-realistic-is-the-last-of-uss-fungus-outbreak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/how-realistic-is-the-last-of-uss-fungus-outbreak\/","title":{"rendered":"How Realistic Is The Last of Us’s Fungus Outbreak?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Who’s hungry for mushrooms?
\n Photo: Liane Hentscher\/HBO<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Spoilers follow for The Last of Us<\/em> TV shows and video games. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks to the sprawling IP universe of the Walking Dead<\/em>, post-apocalyptic narratives about social collapse, hungry hordes, and desperate communities clinging to the last vestiges of civilization are familiar on TV by this point. All that stuff is in The Last of Us<\/em>too \u2014 just not any zombies.<\/p>\n

The HBO series based on the popular video-game franchise from writer Neil Druckmann (seemingly not a fan<\/a> of the \u201czombie\u201d descriptor) focuses on a different kind of infection: a fungal one. Unlike the Walking Dead <\/em>or resident Evil<\/em>in which the dead come back to life, or 28 Days Later<\/em>in which a virus turns its hosts extremely violent, the cordyceps<\/em> fungus in The Last of Us<\/em> takes over people’s brains, grows sponge-y masses inside bodies and tendrils out of mouths, and eventually bursts from eyes and foreheads. Humans stay alive as all this happens and spread the infection through bites, and in the course of a weekend, the global warming-enabled fungi mutation has seemingly traveled around the entire world.<\/p>\n

Of The Last of Us<\/em> premiere episode, 20 years have passed with no progress made against the fungal threat \u2014 which is because of the real-life similarities between fungi and humans as eukaryotes, or organisms with nucleated cells, explains Dr. Ilan Schwartz, an instructor with the Duke University School of Medicine who specializes in immunocompromised hosts and invasive fungal infections.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur cells are a lot more complex than, for example, bacteria, and fungi are more related to people than they are to bacteria that cause infections,\u201d says Dr. Schwartz of why there are only three antifungal agents compared with \u201cway more classes of antibacterials.\u201d \u201cWe have this problem with our adversary being closely related, and what that means is that the cell machinery is the same as ours. There are far fewer targets for antifungals to work with, to selectively cause damage to fungal cells without causing damage to human cells.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those commonalities, plus that uncomfortably true-to-life climate-change framing and the grotesquerie of the infected in The Last of Us<\/em>got us thinking: How scared should we be of cordyceps<\/em> or any other wide-scale fungal infection, anyway? An investigation!<\/p>\n

SPORES VERSUS BITES <\/strong>
the <\/em>hurting plot point in The Last of Us<\/em> was inspired by Druckmann’s viewing of a 2008 planet earth <\/em>segment about how the fungal parasite Ophiocordyceps unilateralis <\/em>takes over a bullet ant’s body and then grows out of the ant’s head to further spread. Narrator David Attenborough explains in the planet earth<\/em> clip how there are thousands of different types of parasitic fungi, each of which focuses on a specific species \u2014 with textured spores, neon-orange poufs, and long gray tendrils emerging from dead moths and beetles. (Although Ophiocordyceps and Cordyceps<\/em> are different genus, because The Last of Us<\/em> was influenced by the latter and refers to the former in its narrative, we’re discussing both.)<\/p>\n