Many fungal infections are found outside areas where the pathogens are thought to be endemic, a new paper says. Climate change may be to blame.
Fungal infections are more widespread than doctors or patients realize, research suggests. And they’re expected to grow all the more so in the coming years.
“We’re definitely seeing disease in locations that we previously have not,” said Dr. George Thompson, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Davis. “And that’s concerning, because if we’re recognizing those locations, where are the places it’s occurring that just have not been recognized quite yet?”, which suggests that more than 10% of fungal infections are diagnosed outside regions where the pathogens are known to be endemic.
That’s becoming a more pressing problem, since research shows that climate change is making these infections more diffuse. For example, coccidioides, the fungus that causes Valley fever, thrives in desert climates, so increased heat and drought have created more hospitable areas for it to grow.
“The great majority of people who get Valley fever will tell you they got a cough that lasts a few weeks and it goes away,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “But when people are immunosuppressed or when they just have bad luck because they got a very large dose, these diseases can disseminate, or get outside the lung.
Typically, different fungal infections are associated with specific regions: Valley fever is most common in the Southwest, for example, whereas histoplasmosis is mostly identified in central and eastern states. But the
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