Climate change could make fungi more dangerous

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By YKAI KUPFERSCHMIDT, Science. 

Excerpt: Scientists have long worried Earth’s rising temperatures could make fungi more dangerous to humans. Now, researchers in China may have stumbled on evidence to support that idea. In a survey of fungal infections in Chinese hospitals, the researchers discovered a fungus not previously reported in humans sickening two patients. The pathogen was already resistant to the two most common antifungal drugs—and when they exposed it to higher temperatures, it quickly developed resistance against a third, leaving it essentially untreatable with current medicines. The finding “supports the idea that global warming may contribute to the evolution of this fungal pathogen or other new fungal pathogens,” says Linqi Wang, a microbiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Microbiology and co-author of a study on the fungi published today in Nature Microbiology.... 

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