In the fictional world of The Last of Us, a fungus has destroyed the world. The new hit TV show highlights Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, an actual “zombie ant” fungus, which compels an infected insect to climb onto a leaf, lay down and wait for spores to sprout from its head and into the wind.
The show takes place in the wreckage of a pandemic, when a mutant strain of the zombifying fungus makes the leap to humans. That jump is no small feat because most species of fungi cannot survive the high temperatures of a warm-blooded body. “It’s far-fetched,” says Tom Chiller, chief of the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That’s just not going to happen.”
But even if microbes don’t hijack our body and sprout from our head, newly infectious and drug-resistant fungi are an emerging threat to human health. Scientific American spoke with Chiller about this fictional pandemic to understand the real possibility of a major fungal outbreak and how our changing climate may worsen these threats.
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