Mycologist on The Last of Uss fungus zombies: its not far-fetched to me
Mild spoilers for previously aired episodes of The Last of Us
The Last of Us is such a solid return to the zombie series that dominated ten years ago. I’m really enjoying it as I particularly like zombie and post-apocalyptic shows. So far it’s better than The Walking Dead ever was, although my memory is tainted by later seasons and I expect the quality to lag as the season progresses. The Last of Us is based on the video game of the same name where a fungus is responsible for the devastating pandemic, not a virus. It’s a unique twist on the zombie genre and they set it up well with scenes showing a prediction of the fungus scourge and how it migrated to people in the early 2000s. According to fungus experts it’s somewhat possible. I don’t know if I want to think too hard about this, but here we are.
To nurse my nascent mycophobia, I turned to Jonathan Cale, an assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia who studies fungus-tree interactions in forests, and Matthew Kasson, an assistant professor of mycology at West Virginia University whose work has focused on Massospora cicadina, a parasitic fungus that—gulp—infects cicadas, alters their behavior to spread itself, and eventually seals their doom.
“It’s not far-fetched for me,” Kasson says of The Last of Us’s nefarious fungi. “They are stranger than fiction.”
The opening scene of The Last of Us features the second epidemiologist attempting to wave off the first’s concerns about a fungal pandemic by reminding his colleague that fungus can’t survive in temperatures above 94 degrees—leaving us toasty humans safe from their spongy clutches.
Alas: “That’s untrue,” Kasson says. “There are a number of fungi that can persist. In fact, we know the limit of fungal growth is about 62 degrees Celsius”—around 143 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than enough heat to cause a burn—“after which many or most eukaryotes, including fungi, can’t grow.”
The Last of Us makes much of the idea that because cordyceps is a fungus, it can’t be treated with medicine. That’s not true: Antifungals abound to treat common fungal conditions like athlete’s foot, yeast infections, ringworm, and dandruff.
But the show is right that fungi are uniquely difficult to battle, Kasson says. “Fungi are more closely related to animals than they are plants. But it’s really hard to get rid of dandruff because they’re eukaryotes and animals and fungi share a lot of similarities. It’s hard to combat them without combating ourselves. So they have to come up with specialized types of compounds that can kill the fungi without harming the host.”
Options remain scant, even if the doctors and scientists in The Last of Us would probably not have immediately given up on fighting cordyceps. Take it from microbiologist Arturo Casadevall, who last year told the Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health magazine, “Because we don’t worry about the fungi, not a lot of work is done with the fungi. So, we don’t have too many drugs. We don’t have any fungal vaccines, and it all becomes kind of circular.”
Further nightmare fodder: Casadevall believes that we’ve already seen a fungus, Candida auris, adapt to the heat of the human body. “As the world is getting warmer, the fungi will have to adapt,” he said. “Every hot day is a selection event.”
I can believe that this could happen based on the science as outlined in that article. (I’m not scared of fungus though and I’ll still eat mushrooms!) More than that I believe that the anti-science response and fallout would be worse than we’ve seen on TV and movies. If you told me in 2019 that over a million people would die in the US alone while countless others would refuse to wear masks pre-vaccine and refuse to get vaccinated, I wouldn’t believe you. The scenes in The Last of Us – entire cities bombed, a protected zone in which military terrorizes and controls citizens – are likely realistic if not underplayed. Truth is scarier and more insidious than fiction. Hopefully I’ll both live a long time and be long gone before another pandemic though.
I wanted to talk about the devastating third episode, featuring guest stars Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett. Usually, when there’s a capsule episode of a series it’s filler and I find it annoying. (I’m thinking of the episode of The Walking Dead with Morgan’s backstory.) This episode was about two characters whom we haven’t met before and won’t see again and yet it was completely spellbinding and touching. My heart ached for both the years they had together and how it ended. I won’t get too spoilery in case you haven’t seen it yet, but it was superb filmmaking and I wasn’t upset at all that a violent zombie show veered in that direction so soon in the first season.
This man is so beautiful
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