Many about the things in this world that can keep you awake at night. There’s COVID-19, of course, but if you’re as anxious as I am, you’re probably nagging a very long list of other fears: being hit by a car, cancer, being poisoned by an improper meal at home. gas station, caught in a wildfire, electrocuted himself while plugging his laptop into a dodgy cafe. But what’s likely not high on your list are mushrooms. Unfortunately, that may be changing.
In 2009, a patient in Japan developed a new fungal infection on their ear. High transmission capacity Candida auris The fungus was previously unknown to science (and resistant to the drugs available to treat it), but within a few years, cases began to appear in Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and South Africa.
Scientists assumed the spread was caused by human travel, but when sequencing the cases, they were surprised to discover that the strains of the bacteria were not closely related. Instead, scientists have seen many independent infections of an unknown fungal disease, appearing around the world at once. About a third of people are infected Candida auris died from the infection within 30 days, and there are now thousands of cases in 47 countries. Some scientists see this sudden explosion in global cases as a harbinger of things to come.
People should consider We’re lucky that they don’t have to worry about fungal infections all the time. “If you were a tree, you would be afraid of mushrooms,” says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies fungal diseases. And if you’re a fish, a reptile or an amphibian, mushrooms should also be pretty high on your fear list, can you count them? (Fungal infections are known to wipe out snakes, fish, corals, insects, etc.) In recent years, a fungal infection is known as a fungal infection. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid) has exterminated amphibian populations around the world, with some scientists estimate that chytrid is responsible for population decline in more than 500 species of amphibians. To put that into context, that’s about one in every 16 amphibian species known to science.
One of the reasons fungal infections are so common in so many organisms is that the fungi themselves are ubiquitous. “This is dating myself, but do you know the song “Every Breath You Take” by Sting? Well, every breath you take in, you inhale somewhere between 100 and 700,000 spores,” said Andrej Spec, a medical mycologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “They’ve made it to the space station. They’re absolutely everywhere.”
People can and do get fungal infections (scalp fungus, for starters, and fungal diseases are one of the leading causes of death for people who are immunocompromised with HIV). But people are generally unlikely to fall for a fungus for one big reason: humans get hot. (Though, if you want to be the pushover at a party, you might be interested to learn that humans in general aren’t 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Usually quoted at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.) That number comes from a German study done in 1851. In fact, the human body’s temperature seems to have cooled down recently, and the global average is between 97.5 and 97.9. degrees F.) Warm-blooded environments in general tend to be too warm for a fungus to survive. One of Casadevall’s studies estimated that 95% of fungal species simply cannot survive at average human internal temperatures.
You can see this temperature barrier in action when you observe animals hibernating, which requires their internal temperature to drop in order to survive the winter. For example, bat species have recently experienced a significant decline due to white nose syndrome, infecting them while they are hibernating and therefore cooler than usual.
For Casadevall, these findings support his theory of the long history of the animal kingdom with fungi. Perhaps our warm-blooded nature, he argues, has evolved specifically to avoid the kinds of fungal infections that can wipe out cold-blooded populations.
