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Deadly fungi is more than a video game problem, it’s becoming a serious issue here in the real world.
As Jinshan Hong and Bhuma Shrivastava of Bloomberg explained this week, “A largely unnoticed surge of rare but deadly fungi is accelerating around the world, helped by the Covid-19 pandemic and a warming planet that appears to be training them to survive at higher and higher temperatures.”
Climate change is partially to blame, helping these fungi to adapt and evolve to heat, meaning that they are getting better at being able to survive in humans with a body temperature of 98.6 degrees. Fungi that can survive at that temperature is the main plot point of the video game and HBO Series The Last of Us.
“This is a worrisome scenario,” said Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, “As the world gets warmer, the microbes are either gonna have to adapt or to die. And we know that they’re very adaptable.”
A new data analysis shows that C. auris has emerged across about 20 geographies since the pandemic started, and is now on every continent except Antarctica. Severe illness-causing fungal outbreaks have also start occurring among young, healthy people, signaling the pathogens’ growing strength.
Cases of deadly fungal outbreaks still remain lower than other causes of death, but the increase in fungi becoming more drug-resistant is alarming. There is also the fact that millions of cases of deadly fungi playing an indirect role in killing people with other illnesses are going unrecorded.
“The world is just waking up to the need to diagnose fungal infections in humans accurately and more quickly,” said Sarah Gurr, a professor specializing in fungal infections at University of Exeter.
Fungi in particular are advancing aggressively, so much so that the World Health Organization in 2022 compiled a list of fungal pathogens most threatening to human health to prioritize development for treatments. But researchers’ efforts to discover and treat new types of fungus are falling behind their pace of spread and evolution.
In March 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expressed concern over a deadly super-fungus that was spreading in the United States at an “alarming rate.”
Guess which fungus the CDC was worried about? That’s right. Candida auris (C. auris).
Between 2019 and the end of 2021, the number people infected with the C. auris super-fungus more than tripled, while reports of asymptomatic cases also tripled.
After four deaths in Mississippi were potentially linked to C. auris in 2021, University of Mississippi Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Lisa Didion explained, “This particular organism is extremely transmissible and has a very high mortality rate.”
And it’s not just Candida auris that has researchers and medical professionals concerned.
In February 2024, it was discovered that several newly discovered species of fungi that are potentially harmful to humans could become airborne during periods of drought.
This past August, multiple people were hospitalized with “valley fever” after a California EDM festival experienced a fungus outbreak.