Because of the poor hygiene of decaying zombies, their mouths, nails or claws, and some fungal growths may contain thriving deposits of bacteria, some lethal, which may facilitate the death of anyone who is directly injured by a zombie. All intermediate formes excrete spores through dermal fruiting bodies.īasic formes usually lack the fungal development to emit airborne spores, but contain spore-rich saliva that is capable of infecting through biting. These spores are excellent bioaerosols, capable of surviving in untreated water and air. Like other fungi, this pathogen spreads through the use of spores.

This poses the possibility that it could have been engineered in a controlled environment, though this is doubtful due to the advanced understanding of gene-splicing that creating such a unique organism would have warranted. It is debatable as to how some of its features could have been completely evolutionarily advantageous, such as the way that it gestates in living organisms and its symptoms appear mostly after the host's death. It is very complex in its workings and has a remarkably distinct genetic structure, supporting the hypothesis that it has long-since diverged from, or evolved entirely separately of all other life on Earth. What is know, however, is that it is almost completely unlike any other pathogen known to man. The zombie fungus was never assigned any official taxonomic rank, nor was it ever scrutinized in the lab extensively enough to be compared to other observed species.

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