https://aeon.co/essays/when-bacteria-kill-us-it-s-more-accid...
We tend to think of the adaptive immune system, antibodies and such, as what protects us from disease. But it isn't nearly important as the automatic immune system that quickly dispatches most potential pathogens that find their way into our body without any period of learning. And that isn't as important as the barriers like skin and mucus that prevent all the critters of the world from getting into us in the first place.
Sheep and horse blood are used as growth media all the time. Not sure about this fungus though.
Though you’d think the body would be able to fight this off.
I am surprised the body didn't kill the spores off though. I'm very curious what portion of his symptoms were from the spores directly, and what portion were from the body's immune reaction going absolutely crazy.
If the symptoms are from the mushrooms and not from an immune response, that seems medically interesting. It might have applications in drug delivery systems, and in a long shot, maybe things like synthetic organs. Keeping the body's immune system from killing itself seems like a major hurdle to that.
Magic mushrooms, in particular, love cow dung as a growing medium.
That being said, fungus tends to be nigh indestructible. The guy boiled it before injection which really speaks to just how hardy those spores can be.
No, he poured boiling water over the mushrooms - big difference. Plenty of time for boiling water to cool before killing all of the spores.
This is a myth. Most magic mushrooms grow in wood, moss, dirt, etc. The media just likes hyping up p. cubensis first whatever reason.
"there are old mycologists and bold mycologists, but no old bold mycologists"
Fungi being more likely to grow in humans are one of the underestimated consequences of climate change which we might run into in the future.
Why would climate change lead to more Fungal growth in humans? Genuine question
- Fungi often don't parasite humans as we are "to warm" (and many other reasons) but with increasing warmer weather fungi will likely adapt to it and in turn become humans become increasingly closer to be "an interesting habitat"
- Changes in weather changing how fungi grow and where they grow making it more likely for existing problematic fungi to come in contact with humans.
Take all of this with a grain of salt it was quite a while ago that I read about it and I mainly remembered the conclusion.
But there had been cases where due to (likely) climate change induced changes in weather fungi started infecting humans, it was either in the US or Australia. So sorry again not much useful information.
I guess it might have been better to not post this without trying to find the articles/dokus I had read/seen about it given that I don't remember to many details besides the conclusion I had.
(EDIT: Try searching "warmer weather fungi humans" at least on duckduckgo this yielded some articles about this which are not the sources I had read and I still have to read and evaluate them, but might find some useful information)