The first case of a plant fungus infecting human beings has been reported from Kolkata.
A 61-year-old man suffering from a hoarse voice, cough, fatigue and difficulty in swallowing is infected by the fungal species Chondrostereum purpureum, says new medical reports. This is the first instance of a new danger that the human race may face in the near future. The fungus, Chondrostereum purpureum, is known to cause Silver leaf disease in plants. However, there were no reported instances of this fungus infecting human beings from any part of the world. Of the hundreds of millions of fungal species, only a few cause infections in humans. This may be the start of a new phenomenon when plant fungus is adapting to invade human cells by evading the process of ‘phagocytosis’. ‘Phagocytosis or ‘cell eating’, happens when a cell uses its plasma membrane to recognise and ingest particles larger than 0.5 μm to clean and defend itself.
Soma Dutta and Ujjwayini Ray of the Consultant Apollo Multispecialty Hospitals in the city detected the case from Kolkata.The case published recently in the journal Medical Mycology Case Reports has raised a serious concern that many such instances may happen in future. Human beings with a compromised immune system are most vulnerable to fungal infection.
We witnessed this during the COVID-19 pandemic when a secondary fungal infection from black fungus resulted in over 4,500 deaths. Most fungi thrive in the range of 12°C to 30°C. But to invade human cells, fungi, on one hand, have to be able to evade the phagocytosis pathway and should have the ability to grow at 35-37 °C temperature. Global warming means the narrowing of the thermal difference between the human body and its surroundings. Every degree increase in the global average temperature reduces this gradient by about 5%. This threat is magnified as some fungi can take the benefit of a natural selection-adaptation strategy, and therefore adapt to a higher temperature by thermal selection.
Fungal infections are expected to pose a more significant threat to human beings in the years to come due to climate change, and reasons such as growing resistance to the small number of treatments available.