Black fungus and coronavirus in India: a warning of the next health disaster
- Threats from fungi are much more widespread than most of us recognise. Worse, an alarming number of fungi are now drug-resistant, in part because the existing antifungal drugs are widely used in pesticides and household paints
It is an alert that our next pandemic need not be viral or bacterial, but could be from a fungus like mucormycosis that eats us from inside, not because it is infectious in its own right, but because it has been given a free ride into our bodies once our immune systems have been compromised by something else.
The fungal threat is huge not because we are being confronted by something new, and against which we have no immunity, but because it has always coexisted with us.
The farm sector has been alert to fungal threats for centuries. From the potato blight that caused the great Irish famine in the 1840s to the coffee leaf rust that, in the 1870s, wiped out coffee in South Asia, leaving it to survive in Central and South America, fungi have always been a clear and present danger.
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The black fungus nightmare facing India’s coronavirus patients
