Climate change, as well as fungicide overuse in agriculture, have driven a rise in fungi capable of infecting people and evading the limited arsenal humans possess to fight them
When the 48-year-old longtime smoker came to Shmuel Shoham, an infectious diseases expert at Johns Hopkins, she was worried about cancer. The woman, who had received a liver transplant decades before, had been coughing and losing weight for months before seeking treatment. The pulmonologist on call biopsied one of the nodules dotting her lungs fearing a tumor. Instead he found, a common fungus—which occurs everywhere from compost piles to carpets to the local flower shop.
But why now, when fungi have long existed on the periphery of medicine? According to Chiller, several factors have pushed fungi to the forefront—among them, the microbes’ ability to evolve quickly, the rise of selective pressures forcing them to adapt, and a growing population of susceptible humans.The speed at which fungi evolve can be startling.
But the liberal use of fungicides—the agricultural counterparts to medicinal antifungals for patients—in response to these threats have had unintended consequences. “That’s when we realized we had this intersection of human and plant fungal pathogens and azole resistance,” Momany says.that samples of azole-resistantfrom the environment were genetically similar to those taken from patients—indicating they came from a common source.found that azole-resistant fungal infections in the Netherlands increased from 0 percent in 1997 to 9.5 percent in 2016.
Generations of fungi rise and fall in a matter of hours, so mutations can build up rapidly. But for Brewer, it’s the fungi that can reproduce both sexually and asexually that scare her because they have the highest evolutionary potential. “Maybe resistance to one fungicide develops in one individual and resistance to another fungicide develops in another,” Brewer says.
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