The discourse surrounding HBO’s “The Last of Us” series has touched upon the opening episode’s very first scene, a creation wholly of the TV show which sees some familiar character actors portraying participants on a 1960s new show discussing pandemics.
In a skillfully moody scene, “The Mummy” alum John Hannah plays an epidemiologist who sets up the threat of the very real Cordyceps fungus and how a mutated strain of the mind-controlling organism eventually jumps from insects to humans and leads to the cataclysmic pandemic of the game.
The scene has sent chills down the bone of many, and Forbes has done a great piece speaking with scientific experts about such a possibility. The short answer is essentially not to worry.
João Araújo, a mycology researcher at the New York Botanical Garden, says fungus are “not prepared to invade, establish within and transmit spores from a human body” and “cannot even establish themselves in any mammals or non-insect animal” after having parasitized insects for more than 130 million years thus far.
David Hughes, a professor of food security at Penn State who also consulted on the first “The Last of Us” game, says that while it’s “not that fanciful” to imagine an infection crossing into humans, any such ‘zombie’ fungus would lose its “mind-controlling powers” in the process.
Charissa de Bekker, an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, agrees and says zombie fungi infect only a very limited range of insects, often only one species, and that’s only after millions of years of evolving alongside one another.
Check out the clip from the episode below. “The Last of Us” continues on HBO on Sunday nights, with the second episode expected to reveal the show’s take on the ‘Clickers’ – people mutated heavily by the fungus who track potential victims with echolocation.
