I have a fungal toenail infection, I fear that I'll turn into a Zombie a la The Girl With All The Gifts.
The Battle Against the Fungal Apocalypse Is Just Beginning
Fungal infections are rising worldwide and climate change may be to blame. Medicine isn’t ready.
IN FEBRUARY, A dermatologist in New York City contacted the state’s health department about two female patients, ages 28 and 47, who were not related but suffered from the same troubling problem. They had ringworm, a scaly, crusty, disfiguring rash covering large portions of their bodies. Ringworm sounds like a parasite, but it is caused by a fungus—and in both cases, the fungus was a species that had never been recorded in the US. It was also severely drug-resistant, requiring treatment with several types of antifungals for weeks. There was no indication where the patients might have acquired the infections; the older woman had visited Bangladesh the previous summer, but the younger one, who was pregnant and hadn’t traveled, must have picked it up in the city.
That seemed alarming—but in one of the largest and most mobile cities on the planet, weird medical things happen. The state reported the cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the New York doctors and some CDC staff wrote up an account for
the CDC’s weekly journal.
Then, in March, some of those same CDC
investigators reported that a fungus they had been tracking—
Candida auris, an
extremely drug-resistant yeast that invades health care facilities and kills two-thirds of the people infected with it—had risen to more than 10,000 cases since it was identified in the US in 2016, tripling in just two years. In April, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services rushed to
investigate cases of a fungal infection called blastomycosis centered on a paper mill, an outbreak that would grow to 118 people, the largest ever recorded. And in May, US and Mexican health authorities
jointly rang an alarm over cases of meningitis, caused by the fungus
Fusarium solani, which seemed to have spread to more than 150 clinic patients via contaminated anesthesia products. By mid-August,
12 people had died.
All of those outbreaks are different: in size, in pathogen, in location, and the people they affected. But what links them is that they were all caused by fungi—and to the small cadre of researchers who keep track of such things, that is worrisome. The experts share a sense, supported by incomplete data but also backed by hunch, that serious fungal infections are occurring more frequently, affecting more people, and also are becoming harder to treat.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-battle-against-the-fungal-apocalypse-is-just-beginning/
