The truly terrifying thing is that the reason fungi have not been a big threat to humans is that there was not evolutionary pressure for them to thrive in human body temperatures.
Now, due to the warming climate there is immense pressure. As fungi evolve to adapt to the warming climate, they are evolving to be able to infect and kill us.
Climate change was mentioned on "The Last of Us" episode 1, at the start. Aside from fictional references, there are fungi that can grow outside of 70-90F up to 130-150F. I believe COVID and people rushing to the hospital emergency room for everything instead of going to their PMC may have had something to do with this fungus finding purchase to infect more people.
Significant or not? <<many other factors may have contributed>>
<<The most enigmatic aspect of the rise of Candida auris as a human pathogen is that it emerged simultaneously on three continents, >>
I would be interested to know if COVID happened everywhere around the same time relatively speaking, with people self-quarantining while all running to the emergency room of hospitals, might explain the "enigma" above.
> The hypothesis that C. auris broke the mammalian thermal barrier through adaptation to climate change suggests several experimental lines of investigation to obtain evidence for and against it.
Nonetheless, they still cite to earlier papers (multiple!) of theirs to argue that they "predicted" their current speculative conclusion; for example,
> Given the capacity of fungal species to adapt to higher temperatures and the fact that many fungal species that are currently nonpathogenic species are likely to have the necessary virulence attributes by virtue of their survival in soils, we previously hypothesized that climate change would bring new fungal diseases
And in case anybody missed it (as I did, initially), the entire body of this "paper" is under the header, "OPINION/HYPOTHESIS".