This is The Guardian.

Apolectic thriller The Last of Us has been the must watch TV series of the year so far, both engrossing and terrifying audiences.

Best guess, the court of steps mutate.

If you haven't heard about it, the premise is that a fungal

infection has taken over the world. We started to get sick. Afternoon, evening,

they got worse, and they started biting.

The show has caught the imagination of its viewers who know a little bit about what

it's like to live through a global pandemic.

Except in this version, there's no medicines and no vaccines.

What there is is a lot of horrible mushroomy zombies that are keen to take a bite out of any

survivor they find. But how much of a threat are fungi to humans? Is a fungal pandemic really possible?

And are we prepared?

From the Guardian, I'm Madeline Finley, and this is Science Weekly. Linda Geddis, you're a science correspondent at The Guardian and so recently you had the fun gal job of writing about the possibility of fungal pandemics, which most of us are now terrified about after watching The Last of Us. What did you make of the show?

I think it's a Champignon show. I love it. I absolutely love it.

I have to say when I first saw this fungus cordiseps which is also known as kind of a zombie ant fungus.

When I first saw that this is what was causing the humans to become zombies,

and what happens to the people when they're infected is they just become

classic zombies and go around biting people and somehow develop superhuman

strength and speed and run in the same kind of jolty way as all zombies do. I

was a bit like oh God here, here we go. But I mean, the show is, it's really, really good. And it explores a kind of full-blown

apocalyptic pandemic scenario in lots of depth. But I want to tell you the story of the

zombie ant fungus because it is fascinating. With this fungus it's cordisets

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