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The science behind the zombie fungus from 'The Last of Us' - ABC News

The science behind the zombie fungus from 'The Last of Us' - ABC News

The science behind the zombie fungus from 'The Last of Us' - ABC News
Feb 05, 2023 1 min, 12 secs

The hit HBO series "The Last Of Us" describes a post-pandemic world devastated by a mass outbreak of a "zombie fungus" that infects and takes over the mind of its hosts.

Ergot poisoning, also dubbed "St. Anthony's Fire," is caused by the contamination of grain and has been attributed to mass hysteria events such as the Salem Witch trials in the 17th century, Matthew Fisher, Ph.D., a professor of fungal disease epidemiology at the Imperial College School of Public Health, said.

Biohazardous threats are much broader than just bacteria and viruses," Jessica Malaty Rivera, infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Boston Children's Hospital and The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told ABC News.

Research has shown that global pandemics from infectious diseases may become more common as habitats continue to bleed into one another and animals are exposed to species they have never interacted with before, while the space between humans and the natural world shrinks.

"These mobile elements are likely to contribute to adaptation in the environment and during an infection," postdoctoral researcher Asiya Gusa Ph.D. of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology in the Duke School of Medicine said in a press release accompanied with the study.

"It is clear that in a warmer wetter world, we are going to be exposed to more [fungi] than ever before – signs of this were seen during Hurricane Katrina – and this is going to pose an increased public health stress," Fisher said.

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