Creeping Dread — The Rise of Fungal Infections

S͙u͙p͙e͙r͙ ͙S͙p͙o͙o͙k͙y͙ for Halloween:
I put my phone away and read this right before bed…

"Considered an ‘urgent antimicrobial resistance threat’ by the CDC, C. auris was first identified in a human patient in 2009, yet it could already fend off most antifungal drugs. The pathogen, which kills about one-third of the people it infects, unnerves physicians and public health officials not only with its invulnerability to treatment but to standard disinfectants: It easily colonizes skin and hospital equipment and then infects other patients and health care workers. C. auris turned up in the US in 2016 and rapidly spread across the country; it’s become so prevalent in some states that health care facilities can’t eradicate it.

Thanks to frequent misdiagnoses, no one knows exactly how many people die annually from fungal infections; estimates range as high as 3.8 million, more than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.

Climate change will surely spawn new virulent pathogens like C. auris. There’s a hypothesis that mammals thrived after the extinction of the dinosaurs in part because fungi couldn’t readily infect their warm-blooded bodies. Now, as all life on Earth tries to adapt to rising temperatures, endothermy may no longer save us. Even if The Last of Us isn’t quite our future, it’s not all science fiction, either."

— From: Medicine@Brown

I’m going to look for novel anti-fungal startups. For example, perhaps the novel mechanism of action in the RNA fungicide from Greenlight could help fight the proverbial zombie apocalypse…