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Fungal infections of people are on the rise, Arturo Casadevall, Johns Hopkins professor and author of “Will the Fungi Win?” states. That’s true because climate change is stimulating the organisms to become more capable of thriving at body temperatures, which used to be too hot for them. Casadevall says don’t panic yet.

Casadevall: The way to prepare is science when I went to medical school I was taught two things: retroviruses are a curiosity for studying cancer, they don't cause human disease. 2 years later HIV shows up. I was told coronaviruses only cause sniffles. Pandemic. Medicine is constantly surprised. The best insurance policy for humanity is to spend on science. If you look at the COVID response within a year there were vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals and rapid tests that you could do at home.   :33

Casadevall is betting on human ingenuity. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.

What is the human thermal barrier? As Arturo Casadevall, Johns Hopkins professor, describes in his new book, “Will the Fungi Win?” it is our normal body temperature, and it has been holding the majority of fungal infections in humans at bay, until now.

Casadevall: There is a fungus called Candida auris that came out of nowhere, not known to medicine till 2009. Then 2011 2012 2013 appears simultaneously in three continents and the isolates are not related. It's not like somebody carried in a plane from South America to South Africa. We have proposed that this is the first fungus that adapted and broke through the human thermal barrier.                    :26

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Candida auris causes severe, multidrug resistant infections that can spread easily among patients in healthcare facilities, and is most likely to infect those who may need ventilators, feeding tubes and other invasive devices. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.

The summer of 2024 is shaping up to be among the hottest on record, and for fungi, that may be just the stimulus needed to enable them to effectively infect humans. That’s according to Johns Hopkins professor Arturo Casadevall in his new book, “Will the Fungi Win?”

Casadevall: Most humans don't worry about the fungi except when we get athletes foot or the nail fungus and the reason for that is we have tremendous protection because we are hot. Our temperature can keep out most of the fungi. Between our temperature and immunity imagine two pillars keeping out the fungal world from our bodies but the big concern is you're 37° and currently you're keeping out about 95% of fungal species but it's going to be really hot out today and the fungi are adapting to temperature.  :30

Casadevall notes that for the most part, people who experience fungal infections have a compromised immune response that allows the organism to gain the upper hand, but as they adapt to higher temperatures that is likely to change. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.

Most of the world’s population is dependent on grains for survival, and if fungal attacks on these food sources continue to increase, starvation of many of us is possible. That’s according to Arturo Casadevall, author of “Will the Fungi Win,” and a professor at Johns Hopkins.

Casadevall: The biggest threat that the fungi pose to humanity is that the fungi of the major passages of plants. Currently they threaten our big crops: maize, corn, rice.    if we were to have entire failures there were just not enough calories to replace grains, so they pose essentially an existential threat to our civilization by what they can do to agriculture.   They're currently devastating entire ecosystems: frogs, salamanders, we are losing the bats.                  :33

Casadevall notes that loss of bats would remove an important predator of insect populations, which could also impact food production. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.

What’s your favorite fungus? You might say mushrooms and stop there, since for most of us a broad knowledge of fungi is lacking. Arturo Casadevall, Johns Hopkins professor and author of a new book, “What if the Fungi Win?” is trying to change that.

Casadevall:  People need to know that the fungal world is essential for life on earth as we know it and yet most of it is underground and you don't see it. The only time you see fungus when you go to the supermarket or when it rains and you see it sprouting out of the ground. Most of it is underground, most of it is invisible. The fungi breakdown everything and recycle the nutrients such that they maintain the life cycles on earth. The fungi gives you statins, the drugs to lower your cholesterol. They give you the penicillins, cephalosporins.  :34

Casadevall says our willful ignorance of fungi both limits our possibilities for utilizing their unique capabilities and may also result in peril. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.

The vast majority of kids in the US go to school, and CDC director Mandy Cohen, at a recent Johns Hopkins talk, says these are very important places to start to set up people for a healthy lifestyle throughout their lives.

Cohen: Schools are such an important space for us to make sure we're thinking about health and well-being, where are those lifelong patterns of health? They start when we're young. Importantly the teachers have a big job to do already in educating our students so the simple things that we can do to make sure that they're flagging things that might be of concern and then to hand those off to folks with more training, expertise. Best when we can do that embedded in a school to make it easy in terms of access. We have a guide for schools on youth mental health to give folks the skills that they need.   :33

Cohen notes that all CDC resources are available online. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.