(ORDO NEWS) — Historically, our body’s best defense against fungi has been our body temperature.
Human bodies are moist and warm, with an average temperature of 36.6 degrees Celsius, which in most cases is too hot for infectious fungi to survive.
But as the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports, rising environmental temperatures due to global warming could give fungi a new evolutionary opportunity to adapt to heat stress.
And that could be very bad news for us warm-tempered people.
“Because fungi are constantly exposed [unlike humans] to elevated temperatures, there is a real threat that some fungi that were previously completely harmless will suddenly become potential pathogens,” Peter Pappas, an expert in in Infectious Diseases from the University of Alabama.
The rise in deaths from fungal infections is already causing much concern.
In 1970, deaths from fungal infections in the US were in the hundreds, according to the WSJ, but data provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that figure rose to more than 4,700 in 2018.
And as recently as 2021, that number rose to 7,200, though about 1,900 of them were related to COVID-19 , the agency notes, which is still a net increase.
Deadly mushrooms
But this may be just the beginning, as fungal adaptations to heat are not the only consequence of rising temperatures.
According to a study published last month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate change may be spurring the evolution of some fungi.
The authors of the study focused on Cryptococcus, a genus of invasive fungus known for causing fatal diseases and infections in immunocompromised people, which the CDC estimates is already responsible for at least 112,000 deaths from brain infections worldwide per year.
When growing cryptococci in a warmer environment, the scientists found that in mushrooms, the speed of movement of “jumping genes” – genes that move between genomes and can cause mutations – is five times higher than normal.
Asia Gusa, co-author of the study and a microbiologist at Duke University, told the WSJ that these changes may be responsible for the accelerated adaptation of fungi to heat.
Meanwhile, according to a recent analysis published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, other deadly fungi such as Candida auris, Histoplasma capsulatum, and Coccidioides have been expanding their presence in the US since the 1950s.
The analysis showed that the territorial presence of Histoplasma capsulatum was once limited to the midwest, but now the deadly fungus is found in 94% of the states.
According to Andrey Spez, a fungal infection expert at the University of Washington School of Medicine and co-author of the analysis, valley fever (coccidioidomycosis), caused by Coccidioides and once common only in the Southwest, is now diagnosed in most states.
Spec also confirmed that the cause of this spread could be an increase in ambient temperature.
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