Candida auris is the main evidence for that argument. The evil yeast was first identified in 2009 in a single patient in Japan, but within a few years it had flourished on several continents. Genetic analyzes showed that the organism had not spread from one continent to another, but had appeared simultaneously on each of them. It also behaved strikingly differently from most yeasts, gaining the ability to move from person to person and thrive on cold inorganic surfaces such as plastic and metal, while accumulating a host of resistance factors that They protected from almost all antifungal drugs.
Arturo Casadevall, a physician and professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, proposed more than a decade ago that the rise of mammals over dinosaurs was driven by inherent prot Phone Number List ection. Internally, we are too hot. Most fungi thrive at 30 degrees Celsius or below, while our body temperature ranges between 36 and 37 degrees Celsius . So when an asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, hurling a cloud of pulverized vegetation and soil and the fungi they contained, Earth's dominant reptiles were vulnerable, but early mammals were not.
Although Casadevall warned of another possibility. If fungi increase their thermotolerance, learning to live at higher temperatures as the climate warms , mammals could lose that built-in protection, and he proposed that the strange success of Candida auris could indicate that it is the first fungal pathogen whose adaptation to Heat allowed him to find a new niche .
Little candid
In the 14 years since its appearance, Candida auris has invaded the healthcare system of dozens of countries . But in that time other fungal infections have also emerged. At the height of the Covid pandemic, India experienced tens of thousands of cases of mucormycosis , commonly called "black fungus", which was eating away at the faces and airways of people vulnerable to diabetes or taking steroids. In California, the diagnosis of coccidioidomycosis , also called “valley fever,” increased 800% between 2000 and 2018. And new species are affecting humans for the first time . In 2018, a team of researchers from the United States and Canada found four people, two from each country, who had been infected by a newly identified genus, Emergomyces . Two of the four died. The fungus got its name because it is "emerging" in the human world. A multinational team subsequently identified five species of that newly named genus that are causing infections around the world, most seriously in Africa.
The mushrooms move
Last April, a research group at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis examined the expected geographic distribution in the United States of what are often called "endemic fungi," that is, those that They only bloom in specific areas. This is valley fever, in the dry southwest of the United States; histoplasmosis , in the humid Ohio River Valley; and blastomycosis , with a range that extended from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and as far east as the Virginia coast. Using Medicare data from more than 45 million seniors who sought medical care between 2007 and 2016, the group found that the historically documented range of these fungi is vastly out of sync with where they are actually causing infections now. They found that histoplasmosis had been diagnosed in at least one county in 94% of US states; blastomycosis, in 78%; and valley fever, in 69%. |
