If a parasite could seize control of a grasshopper’s brain and make it commit suicide, isn’t that something humans should be worried about?
Let’s explore four microorganisms that, when exaggerated to apocalyptic proportions, could conceivably spell the beginning of the end for human civilisation.
Fungus: Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
O. unilateralis – also known as the zombie-ant fungus – is known to infect carpenter ants in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, causing them to crawl to the forest understorey, fix themselves to a leaf, and then die. At this point, O. unilateralis’ stalks drill through the thick ant exoskeleton and sprout out from just behind its head. When climate conditions are right and – as an article published in journal “Communicative and Integrative Biology” suspects – when ant populations are at their peak, the stalks shoot spore missiles down to the population below to infect more hosts.
Research also suggests that different bug species may have their own fungi, and that the fungi only releases its brain toxin when it infects the right ant. There are also myriad other insect species affected by this fungi family, also known as Cordyceps.
So what if it suddenly mutated and decided humans were a better host? Imagine “The Happening”, but instead where humans are crawling into light-filled, high spaces, growing stalks out of their brains, and then dying.
Bacteria: Super-bugs and drug resistance
In China, it’s reported that 25% of patients are currently infected with a strain of bacteria holding the mcr-1 gene – that is, a resistance to the antibiotic colistin. Colistin, if you don’t know, is considered a last-resort antibiotic. It’s an old drug that most doctors don’t use unless their patients have no other choice, but that choice may no longer be an option.
“The world is facing an antibiotic apocalypse,” said Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer.
This was the topic of an international medical conference in October 2017. It was organised to help the UN, various governments and the Antimicrobial Resistance Inter-Agency Coordination Group battle against the statistics – 700,000 people a year die from drug-resistant infections, and that figure is predicted to rise to 10 million by 2050, says UK charity Wellcome.
If 10 million people die a year, it’ll take over 700 years to wipe out human existence. But will that annual figure increase? Roll the dice.
Virus: Ebola, or an apocalyptic version of it
There is currently no proven vaccine for the Ebola virus disease (EVD), states the WHO – though not through lack of trying. At the same time, this virus has swept through certain African nations with a fatality rate of 50 per cent (although rates of up to 90 per cent have been recorded).
EVD is thought to come from infected animals such as fruit bats, porcupines and monkeys, who will have transmitted the disease to humans through close contact with blood, secretions, organs or bodily fluids. Now it spreads from human to human in much the same way, leading numerous health workers to have contracted the disease. Current research is ongoing as to whether or not it can be transmitted sexually.
Although to suggest that Ebola is about to destroy the human species is of course a work of post-apocalyptic fictional nonsense, it’s from pathogens like EVD that make writers like me go wild with imagination. These outbreaks are horrifying, and can be devastating to large populations – when even health workers can’t help you, who can? Maybe it’ll be on the back of a mutated Ebola that the zombie virus will spread.
We’ll see, anyway.
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