Deadly fungi are an emerging microbe threat
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Boycotting Indian manufactured medication is probably neither feasible nor a solution. Nuances of regulation matter.
I remember a horror story about how patients would say their psych meds didn't work. Because the patients were, you know, mentally ill, nobody took it seriously. It turned out the FDA had approved the drug based on testing only some of the dosages, and the one that was problematic was not dissolving like it was supposed to.
even the AIMS protocol doesn't recommend against drugs and techniques that the rest of the world has rejected almost a year ago. My partner treats covid in the US and has been doing consults to patients in India. Most of their work is telling patients to ignore the pills their doctors or government has been sending, although they rarely listen.
I wouldn't be surprised if a large chunk of the covid negative or mild covid population is on steroids.
I do not think that the problem is steroid usage by itself but depressing lack of even basic hygiene even in hospitals.
PS. Blood thinning is standard procedure in COVID-19 care for many hospitals, dunno how reasonable at home without any tests. Remdesivir is injected, I do not believe that it is distributed. Perhaps you meant ivermectin?
Hygiene in hospital is definitely a possibly other issue.
At least by US standards, blood thinners are not a reasonable procedure for mild symptoms either. In general India is being extremely aggress with using prescriptions, at least compared to the west and Eastern Asia. There are many examples where AIMS protocol and Indian standard guidance is contrary to WHO, NHS, and CDC guidance.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2021/may/11/what-is-the-d...
Mark Twain
You don't get credit for predicting 10 of the last 1 pandemics.
> Not all of our vulnerability is the fault of medicine preserving life so successfully. Other human actions have opened more doors between the fungal world and our own. We clear land for crops and settlement and perturb what were stable balances between fungi and their hosts. We carry goods and animals across the world, and fungi hitchhike on them. We drench crops in fungicides and enhance the resistance of organisms residing nearby. We take actions that warm the climate, and fungi adapt, narrowing the gap between their preferred temperature and ours that protected us for so long.
Still early stages, but signs point to fungi becoming deadlier.
Animals evolved warm-bloodedness partly to improve resistance to environmental fungi. Meanwhile, insects (bees, ants, others) actually farm fungi as part of their food and for defense. This all points to a really profound and fundamental fact: We have been co-existing with fungi every second of every person's entire lives.
If fungi are killing more people, it's because people have changed, not the fungi.
I was listening to a podcast recently that discussed how human average body temperature has been declining in recent years while heat tolerance of fungi has been rising (thanks to the climate). The result is that our bodies are less capable of preventing fungal infections through heat and fungi can be pretty deadly if unchecked.
What? More details and citations are needed.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201028171432.h....
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/01/human-body-te...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-body-te...
The studies that found this also found that 1. sperm counts stopped and went back up again 2. men with lower testosterone have more children.
In order to do that, individuals with too low a body temperature would be removed from the group due to infections. This would create a balanced system between body temperature (energy expenditure) and bacterial immunity.
With the development of antibiotics, this changed. The previous bottom of the group is not culled anymore, removing the barrier of the imbalance. Therefore, the group is 'safely' selecting for lower body temperatures.
The theory is that in wealthy countries with good public health, there's less need to maintain a high body temperature to fend off threats. The show said that human body temperature "has been steadily declining for decades at a rate of, like, .05 degrees Fahrenheit per decade." (though not in less developed countries)...average is said to be more like 97.5 degrees.
So it's possible this reduction reflects a change in our diets
> If fungi are killing more people, it's because people have changed, not the fungi.
That's an overreach. It could be either or both. Obviously fungi are evolving rapidly as you yourself point out.
Where commenters of course insist that fungi can't develop resistance to anti-fungals, and fungal infections aren't dangerous in the first place.
But I'm not that worried about antibiotic resistance, because there are many ways to skin a cat. MRNA vaccines, bacteriophages, targeted antibiotics, nanotech, etc all offer us ways to break free from the natural arms race that we're in right now.
My microbiology professor used to be terrified of these things. Probably still is.
But these shorter Adam Curtis vids have always confused me a bit. Are they just parts of longer documentaries that Ive never come across or does he sometimes produce these things to be under 10min? Were these aired on the BBC in between other programs or something?
* https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_Brain_Infectio...
>Infectious disease is one area where fear of the unknown is rational. We don't just need to defend against existing diseases, but also diseases yet to emerge.
Sage wisdom shared a mere year before the covid outbreak.
But really the potential of prions is so bad if they could realise it we’d already be done for, they’d be a homogenising swarm.
Fungi though, fungi already do a lot, and they’re as ridiculously varied and flexible as they’ve been neglected. The next zoonotic threat being fungi makes a lot of sense, and it sounds rather bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8
They even made a movie about this jumping to humans called "The Girl with all the Gifts"
Another form of this is in Cicadas: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997998920/the-fungus-thats-ma...
The fungi is essentially a cicada STD which eats at their bodies.
"Every man dies. Not every man really lives" - William Wallace