It happened this year.A dermatologist in New York contacted the state health department to ask two female patients, 28 and 47 years old, A person who is not related by blood but suffers from the same problem. They suffer from ringworm, a disfiguring, scaly, crusted rash that covers most of their body. Ringworm looks like a parasite, but it’s caused by a fungus, and in both cases it’s a species that’s never been documented in the United States. In addition, it is highly resistant to drugs and requires treatment with various types of antifungal drugs for several weeks. There was no indication that the patient had contracted the virus; the older woman had visited Bangladesh last summer, but the younger woman was pregnant at the time and had not traveled, so must have been infected in the city.
new york mushrooms
It might seem alarming, but in one of the largest cities on earth, a strange medical incident has occurred. The state reported the cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and doctors in New York and some CDC staff wrote a report for the CDC’s weekly magazine.
That happened in February. In March, researchers at the CDC reported that a fungus they had been tracking, Candida aurisan extremely resistant yeast, Hacking medical facilities and killing two-thirds of those infected, Has risen to more than 10,000 cases Since its discovery in the United States in 2016, it has tripled in just two years. In April, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services urgently investigated cases of a fungal infection called blastomycosis centered on a paper mill; the outbreak grew to 118, the largest on record. And in May, U.S., Mexican health authorities join forces to sound alarm bells over meningitis casescaused by fungi Fusarium solani, the virus appears to have spread to more than 150 clinic patients through contaminated anesthesia products. As of mid-August, 12 people had died.
Many kinds of dangerous mushrooms
All of these outbreaks were different: in size, pathogen, location, and population affected.But what connects them is are caused by fungi, worry about what to a small group of researchers Who keeps track of these cases. Experts agree that serious fungal infections are becoming more common, affecting more people, and becoming more difficult to treat, a feeling supported by patchy data and partly a hunch.
“We don’t have a good surveillance system for fungal infections,” admits Tom Chiller, an infectious disease physician and chief of the CDC’s division of fungal diseases, “so it’s hard to give an answer based on complete data. But There must be an increase“.
Why Are Yeast Infections on the Rise?
There can be more than one answer. More people are living longer with chronic diseases, and their compromised immune systems make them vulnerable. But the problem is not only that fungal diseases are more common, but that fungal diseases are more common. In addition, new pathogens are emerging and existing pathogens are occupying new territories. When experts tried to imagine what could have such pervasive effects, they concluded that the problem might be… climate change.
Fungi live in the environment; they affect us when they encounter us, but for many people their original home is vegetation, decaying plant matter and soil. “While this may be speculative, it is entirely possible that if we had an environmental organism in the world with a very specific ecological niche, we would need only very small changes in surface or air temperature to change its ecological niche and allow proliferation,” said Dr Neil Stone, head of the Department of Fungal Infections at University College Hospital, London. “It’s this plausibility, and the lack of any alternative explanation, that makes it credible as a hypothesis,” he noted.
We are too hot for mushrooms
Candida auris is the main evidence for this argument. The evil yeast was first identified in a patient in Japan in 2009, but within a few years it had spread across multiple continents. Genetic analysis showed that the organism did not spread from one continent to another, but appeared on each continent at the same time. It also behaves significantly differently from most yeasts, with the ability to spread from person to person and thrive on cold inorganic surfaces like plastic and metal, while also accumulating many resistance factors that prevent its growth. Unaffected by almost all antifungal drugs.
Arturo Casadevall, a 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 relative to dinosaurs was driven by inherent conservation of. We are too hot inside. Most fungi thrive at temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius or below, while our body temperature is between 36 and 37 degrees Celsius.. So when an asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago, ejecting a cloud of pulverized vegetation and soil and the fungi it contained, Earth’s dominant reptiles were vulnerable, but early mammals were not.
Although Casa de Val warns of another possibility.If fungi develop heat tolerance and learn to live at higher temperatures as the climate warms, mammals may lose this built-in protection, he proposes, this odd success Candida auris can show that it is First fungal pathogen whose adaptation to heat enables it to find a new niche.
Candida minor
Since its birth 14 years ago, Candida auris Has violated the health of dozens of countries. But at the same time, other fungal infections emerged.At the height of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, tens of thousands of cases appeared in India MucormycosisCommonly known as “black fungus,” it can corrode the face and airways of people prone to diabetes or taking steroids.In California, the diagnosis CoccidioidomycosisAlso known as “valley fever,” it increased 800 percent between 2000 and 2018. New species affects humans for the first time. In 2018, a team of researchers from the United States and Canada found four people (two from each country) infected with a newly discovered genus, Bacillus. Two of the four died. The fungus got its name because it “appeared” in the human world. A multinational team then identified five species of the newly named genus that are causing infections around the world, most severely in Africa.
mushroom mobile
Last April, a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis looked at the projected geographic range of the United States for what are commonly referred to as “endemic fungi,” meaning those that bloom only in specific regions.It’s about Valley Fever in the arid Southwestern United States; it’s Histoplasmosisin the wet valley of the Ohio River; and BlastomycosisThe range extends from the Great Lakes along the Mississippi River to New Orleans and east to the coast of Virginia. Using Medicare data on more than 45 million seniors who sought treatment between 2007 and 2016, the team found that the range of these fungi that were recorded historically was far from the range of infections they actually cause today. They found that histoplasmosis had been diagnosed in at least one county in 94 percent of U.S. states; blastomycosis, 78 percent; and valley fever, 69 percent.
This is such a broad extension that it calls into question the meaning of: localso much so that Patrick Mazi, an associate professor of medicine and lead author of the paper, urge the doctor Stop Thinking of Fungal Infections as Geographically Determined And pay attention to symptoms. “Let’s realize that everything is dynamic and changing,” he advises. “For the sake of our patients, we should recognize this.”