More good climate news: fungus [View all]

[orthoclad]

There's a new pathogenic fungus in the US that causes serious illness in humans. It was first detected in India ten years ago, and is spreading. The CDC is deeply concerned and has asked any laboratories which detect it to immediately report it.

From WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/07/23/deadly-fungal-disease-may-be-linked-climate-change-study-suggests/?itid=lk_inline_manual_23
"Three years ago, U.S. health officials warned hundreds of thousands of clinicians in hospitals around the country to be on the lookout for a new, quickly spreading and highly drug-resistant type of yeast that was causing potentially fatal infections in hospitalized patients around the world.

Candida auris has become a serious global health threat since it was identified a decade ago, especially for patients with compromised immune systems. It has been reported in more than 30 countries and is probably more widespread than that because the organism is hard to identify without specialized laboratory methods. It is resistant to multiple antifungal drugs, and can spread between patients in hospitals and other health-care facilities and cause outbreaks. The fungus can lead to infections of the bloodstream, heart or brain, and early studies estimate that it is fatal in 30 to 60 percent of patients."
(btw, paywalls can often be side-stepped by blocking scripts or using Reader View in your browser. You might lose pictures, animations, and extras, but the text is readable.)

The article goes on to state that, in general, fungal infections are defeated by human body temperatures. A leading theory speculates that C. auris evolved to tolerate the higher temperatures of global heating, and thus tolerates human body temperature. This theory is described here:
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01397-19
"The most enigmatic aspect of the rise of Candida auris as a human pathogen is that it emerged simultaneously on three continents, with each clade being genetically distinct. Although new pathogenic fungal species are described regularly, these are mostly species associated with single cases in individuals who are immunosuppressed. In this study, we used phylogenetic analysis to compare the temperature susceptibility of C. auris with those of its close relatives and to use these results to argue that it may be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change, with the caveat that many other factors may have contributed."

The CDC has published a fact sheet on C. Auris, at
https://www.cdc.gov/fungal/candida-auris/c-auris-drug-resistant.html

I know. We don't need more terrible news. But this is yet one more consequence of mining and using petrochemicals. Besides the well-documented global heating, there are many dangerous surprises popping up. Scientists shave been warning that pandemics of novel pathogens are a likely result of climate change.

The boat is rocking.