Dangerous fungal pathogens are on the rise worldwide. They eat away at the lungs, poison the tissue, and invade the brain. We are hardly prepared for these types of infections, experts warn. It is therefore high time to expand our meager medical arsenal.
Probably just a cold. 44-year-old Torrence Irvin doesn’t think too much about it at first when he can hardly breathe properly. But the tall, powerfully built warehouse manager from the town of Patterson in California is getting weaker by the day. When one of his two daughters finds him lying on the floor, he is taken to the hospital. The doctors suspect pneumonia, but antibiotics bring no improvement. Instead: fever, night sweats, weight loss. From 140 kilos to 75. He has to deal with the problem himself.
Finally, a test yields the correct diagnosis: Torrence Irvin is suffering from an infection caused by fungi. Its medical name – coccidioidomycosis – is complicated, which is why it is often called “valley fever” in the USA. Seven months after the first symptoms of the disease appeared, Irvin will have lost 75 percent of his lung capacity.
Fungi form a huge, barely researched kingdom with an estimated three million different species. They existed on earth before the first mammals appeared. We could not live without them: fungi are vital for more than 80 percent of all plants, providing them with oxygen or minerals. Some even live inside us as intestinal inhabitants.
But fungi can also pose a deadly threat to plants and animals. They destroy trees and banana plantations. When potato blight destroyed Ireland’s crops in the mid-19th century, a million people starved to death. Two million more emigrated, mainly to the USA, Canada or Australia. Fungi kill bats, dolphins and salamanders. When a fungus called Bd-chytrid settles on a frog’s skin, it crumbles into shreds.