<
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deadly-fungi-are-the-newest-emerging-microbe-threat-all-over-the-world/>
"We are likely to think of fungi, if we think of them at all, as minor
nuisances: mold on cheese, mildew on shoes shoved to the back of the closet,
mushrooms springing up in the garden after hard rains. We notice them, and then
we scrape them off or dust them away, never perceiving that we are engaging
with the fragile fringes of a web that knits the planet together. Fungi
constitute their own biological kingdom of about six million diverse species,
ranging from common companions such as baking yeast to wild exotics. They
differ from the other kingdoms in complex ways. Unlike animals, they have cell
walls, not membranes; unlike plants, they cannot make their own food; unlike
bacteria, they hold their DNA within a nucleus and pack cells with
organelles—features that make them, at the cellular level, weirdly similar to
us. Fungi break rocks, nourish plants, seed clouds, cloak our skin and pack our
guts, a mostly hidden and unrecorded world living alongside us and within us.
That mutual coexistence is now tipping out of balance. Fungi are surging beyond
the climate zones they long lived in, adapting to environments that would once
have been inimical, learning new behaviors that let them leap between species
in novel ways. While executing those maneuvers, they are becoming more
successful pathogens, threatening human health in ways—and numbers—they could
not achieve before.
Surveillance that identifies serious fungal infections is patchy, and so any
number is probably an undercount. But one widely shared estimate proposes that
there are possibly 300 million people infected with fungal diseases worldwide
and 1.6 million deaths every year—more than malaria, as many as tuberculosis.
Just in the U.S., the CDC estimates that more than 75,000 people are
hospitalized annually for a fungal infection, and another 8.9 million people
seek an outpatient visit, costing about $7.2 billion a year."
Via Ted Kahn.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
