Deadly fungi are an emerging microbe threat

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deadly-fungi-are-the-newest-emerging-microbe-threat-all-over-the-world/

by laurex • 5 years ago

124 76 5 years ago

everdrive2• 5 years ago

Are they becoming deadlier? Or, did they just rise higher in the list by virtue of the fact that other threats were mitigated.

ipsum23• 5 years ago

That mutual coexistence is now tipping out of balance. Fungi are surging beyond the climate zones they long lived in, adapting to environments that would once have been inimical, learning new behaviors that let them leap between species in novel ways. While executing those maneuvers, they are becoming more successful pathogens, threatening human health in ways—and numbers—they could not achieve before.

Still early stages, but signs point to fungi becoming deadlier.

bdamm3• 5 years ago

It's a bit of creative writing, mostly. Fungi evolve, that's what they do. And they evolve very rapidly. They also have great staying power, with spores that have covered every square millimeter of the earth pretty much for the entire history of life on earth. You're breathing some in right now.

Animals evolved warm-bloodedness partly to improve resistance to environmental fungi. Meanwhile, insects (bees, ants, others) actually farm fungi as part of their food and for defense. This all points to a really profound and fundamental fact: We have been co-existing with fungi every second of every person's entire lives.

If fungi are killing more people, it's because people have changed, not the fungi.

tbwriting2• 5 years ago

15th paragraph:

Not all of our vulnerability is the fault of medicine preserving life so successfully. Other human actions have opened more doors between the fungal world and our own. We clear land for crops and settlement and perturb what were stable balances between fungi and their hosts. We carry goods and animals across the world, and fungi hitchhike on them. We drench crops in fungicides and enhance the resistance of organisms residing nearby. We take actions that warm the climate, and fungi adapt, narrowing the gap between their preferred temperature and ours that protected us for so long.

shoto_io• 5 years ago

Might be also be attributed to attention bias. Interest in fungi steadily grew -in my perception at least- over the last years.

a3w• 5 years ago

Take over the world as: bacteria, easy. Virus, easy, but a little random. Fungi? Now the player needs to start thinking. Source: Plague Inc.

Yuioup2• 5 years ago

Oh what now

bmitc• 5 years ago

A film by Adam Curtis about how all of us have become Richard Nixon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxV3_bG1EHA

pkdpic_y9k• 5 years ago

Love it, the mans brain is made of solid gold dogecoin tesla NFTs as always.

But these shorter Adam Curtis vids have always confused me a bit. Are they just parts of longer documentaries that Ive never come across or does he sometimes produce these things to be under 10min? Were these aired on the BBC in between other programs or something?

foobiekr• 5 years ago

I believe this is extracted from “The Trap.”

alea_iacta_est2• 5 years ago

Gotta keep the plebs scared or they may start asking questions...

ryanmarsh• 5 years ago

Eat the bugs, live in the pod

bigbillheck2• 5 years ago

Don't misunderestimate fungus, buddy: http://www.fao.org/agriculture/crops/rust/stem/rust-report/s...

alea_iacta_est2• 5 years ago

And meteors, and murder hornets, and rip current, and sun flares, and cholesterol, and lightnings, tornados, straight-line wind, fast food, microwaves... and ... and ...

"Every man dies. Not every man really lives" - William Wallace

Red_Leaves_Flyy2• 5 years ago

One can do both. Even an uneducated poor grunt like me can simultaneously worry about novel diseases and the countless corrupt machinations at play the world over.

phaemon• 5 years ago

What great questions have you asked?

trey-jones• 5 years ago

Wait, I thought it was prions. See? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18648043

Red_Leaves_Flyy2• 5 years ago

fallingknife on Dec 10, 2018
Infectious disease is one area where fear of the unknown is rational. We don't just need to defend against existing diseases, but also diseases yet to emerge.

Sage wisdom shared a mere year before the covid outbreak.

pmlnr• 5 years ago

prions are one of those things I wish I never started reading about. It's like reading about Lovecraftian gods when you know there's nothing that could protect you if it hits you.

masklinn• 5 years ago

Por que no los dos?

But really the potential of prions is so bad if they could realise it we’d already be done for, they’d be a homogenising swarm.

Fungi though, fungi already do a lot, and they’re as ridiculously varied and flexible as they’ve been neglected. The next zoonotic threat being fungi makes a lot of sense, and it sounds rather bad.

matheusmoreira5• 5 years ago

Prions are dangerous but unlike fungi they remain rare. Mercifully.

actinium2262• 5 years ago

"I have lived through many great tragedies in my life, and some of them actually happened"

Mark Twain

na85• 5 years ago

I don't understand the relevance of this quote.

jcelerier• 5 years ago

Cataclysmic events are very often reported by newspapers, but in practice only a few are actually cataclysmic

tbwriting2• 5 years ago

Imagine posting this in 2018 under an article about coronaviruses in bats.

acheron• 5 years ago

Or in 2002 or 2011 about coronaviruses or in 2015 about ebola or in 2009 about swine flu or or or...

You don't get credit for predicting 10 of the last 1 pandemics.

actinium2262• 5 years ago

Yes, exactly, some of them actually happened!

allturtles• 5 years ago

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/04/never-happened/

some_account_• 5 years ago

In related news, there has been a recent outbreak in India of deadly "Black Fungus" in Covid patients.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2021/may/11/what-is-the-d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucormycosis

antiviral• 5 years ago

Fungi can be very potent. There is a form of fungi called Cordyceps that invade the brains of ants and change their behavior in a way that increases its spread. Here's a clip by Attenborough explaining it best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8

They even made a movie about this jumping to humans called "The Girl with all the Gifts"

lifty• 5 years ago

They also made a video game inspired by it, called The Last of Us. One of my favorite games.

tonyhb• 5 years ago

This is where the inspiration for The Last of Us came from.

Another form of this is in Cicadas: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997998920/the-fungus-thats-ma...

The fungi is essentially a cicada STD which eats at their bodies.

astrange3• 5 years ago

Mammals are much more resistant to parasites though - we have better immune systems, a high internal body temperature, and don't use pheromones. All of those are essentially there to prevent fungi from mind controlling us.

eloff2• 5 years ago

It's David Attenborough.

ctoth• 5 years ago

Reminds me of this fantastic short novel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27238610

qart2• 5 years ago

Drug resistant microbes are getting bred by Indian pharma factories [corrected from "pharmacies"] through their own carelessness [1]. I think it's high time WHO or some such agency got more powers to penalize the perpetrators beyond the jurisdiction of the country. If these bugs start in one place, people on the other side of the globe get affected quickly too. At the moment, it seems that the best the west can do is not buy from factories that pollute. But this measure is insufficient.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9EJuAU2Un4

ozborn• 5 years ago

The article was about fungal infections, not bacterial infections. In both cases the amount of both antibiotics and anti-fungals used by humans is small relative to their use in agriculture. That may be an easier place to start, although it doesn't preclude sanction against whatever bad practices are described in your linked video (didn't watch).

qart2• 5 years ago

The video is about effluents form the pharma industry. The scale dwarfs any abuse by both human patients and animal farming. I have modified my comment above because I had used the wrong word.

nightwing• 5 years ago

The only effective way to reduce use of anti-fungals in agriculture is to develop new resistant varieties of plants, but that is sadly blocked by people unreasonably fearing gmo.

perl4ever• 5 years ago

There was a big scandal a few years back, with a compounding pharmacy I think was in the northeastern US, which had some issue where they were contaminating medication with mold. It was being injected into patients, who were then having very diverse and horrible problems over time.

Boycotting Indian manufactured medication is probably neither feasible nor a solution. Nuances of regulation matter.

I remember a horror story about how patients would say their psych meds didn't work. Because the patients were, you know, mentally ill, nobody took it seriously. It turned out the FDA had approved the drug based on testing only some of the dosages, and the one that was problematic was not dissolving like it was supposed to.

brundolf• 5 years ago

Tell me when I need to actually do something about it. Until then, I have better things to spend my mental energy on.

blueblisters• 5 years ago

In India, Mucormycosis, a rare fungal infection is being seen in patients recovering from Covid-19. It has been declared an epidemic I believe. Doctors believe that high blood sugar and an indiscriminate use of steroids to reduce Covid-19 inflammation is linked to the spread.

sdljfjafsd2• 5 years ago

This isn't surprising to me. In India a lot of state governments are sending covid pill packs to citizens which really don't do anything for covid and contain things like hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, zinc, other steroids, and other blood thinners.

even the AIMS protocol doesn't recommend against drugs and techniques that the rest of the world has rejected almost a year ago. My partner treats covid in the US and has been doing consults to patients in India. Most of their work is telling patients to ignore the pills their doctors or government has been sending, although they rarely listen.

I wouldn't be surprised if a large chunk of the covid negative or mild covid population is on steroids.

nojokes• 5 years ago

Systemic corticosteroids are strongly recommended for patients by WHO. I see from here https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/remdesi... that also budesonide is recommended for patients with mild symptoms and the usage of is backed up by recent studies.

I do not think that the problem is steroid usage by itself but depressing lack of even basic hygiene even in hospitals.

PS. Blood thinning is standard procedure in COVID-19 care for many hospitals, dunno how reasonable at home without any tests. Remdesivir is injected, I do not believe that it is distributed. Perhaps you meant ivermectin?

woeirua• 5 years ago

You should be much more concerned about bacteria developing antibiotic resistance. While fungi are undoubtedly evolving quickly and may one day pose a risk to us, the devil we know is already working very quickly to overwhelm our best medications. And we know that without those medications millions per year will die.

But I'm not that worried about antibiotic resistance, because there are many ways to skin a cat. MRNA vaccines, bacteriophages, targeted antibiotics, nanotech, etc all offer us ways to break free from the natural arms race that we're in right now.

mrweasel• 5 years ago

The issue with fungi is that we have so litte efficient medication. What little we do have is slowly being render useless by its overuse in agriculture.

matheusmoreira5• 5 years ago

We've got a lot of pharmacological weapons suitable for use against bacteria. For fungi we have azoles, amphotericin B... That's pretty much it.

My microbiology professor used to be terrified of these things. Probably still is.

MrMan• 5 years ago

There is a new third class of anti fungals

devops000• 5 years ago

It will be the new COVID?

throw0101a• 5 years ago

I for one welcome our new Cordycep Overlords:

* https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_Brain_Infectio...

edejong3• 5 years ago

Radiolab published a podcast about it in 2020: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/fungu...

Alex3917• 5 years ago

Discussed previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995095

Where commenters of course insist that fungi can't develop resistance to anti-fungals, and fungal infections aren't dangerous in the first place.

Deadly fungi are an emerging microbe threat

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