More than 1.6 million people die a year from fungal infections - about three times more than from malaria. Every year there are more fungal diseases in the world, becoming more deadly, and we still know little about them and how to fight them. Fungi are a separate kingdom in nature, neither animals nor plants. Some of their properties make it very difficult to fight them or develop drugs to treat the infections they cause. Death from fungal infections is, according to many researchers, a "silent epidemic".
There are about five million species of fungi in the world. Only a few hundred of them are pathogenic to humans. We dedicated this episode of HUJICAST to them with the help of Dr. Neta Schlesinger, who researches pathogenic fungi, toxic to both humans and plants.
Dr. Schlesinger's laboratory uses a multidisciplinary approach to address two broad questions: what are the mechanisms that allow fungi to overcome the immune system and cause disease, and how can the immune response of the host body protect against fungal pathogens.
The increase in infections and diseases that come from fungi is linked to several factors: the climate crisis, which causes more and more species of fungi to adapt to higher temperatures, and thus survive in the human body as well; how fungi learn to develop resistance quickly against most types of drugs; new drugs that weaken the immune system (such as in organ transplant recipients and chronic patients) making it easier for fungus to develop in the human body. Fungi thrive precisely in the environment where we are most vulnerable: in hospitals, and especially in intensive care units. During the Corona period, approximately 30 percent of those hospitalized in intensive care units developed fatal fungal infections. About sixty percent of them died, after treatment. That's a lot.
Some of pathogenic fungi are carried in the air, some settle on medical surfaces and thus penetrate the human body. We talked about some of the more deadly fungi: Fusarium oxysporum, Aspergillus fumigatus and Candida auris - the fungus resistant to all drugs. This fungus has been described by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as a "serious global health threat".
Scary, but there is hope. Dr. Schlesinger and her team are working on several methods to fight pathogenic fungi and develop drugs that can defeat them. One way is to make fungi perform "programmed cell death" on their own, or in other words, commit suicide. Another way is to recruit viruses that grow on fungi to fight them. We wish her luck.