'Deadly fungus' could spark next pandemic with disease that causes brain swelling

The US could soon be seeing a rise of "deadly" fungal infections that often block breathing and cause horrific brain swelling, according to an expert.

The flesh-eating zombies seen on HBO's Last of Us may not be roaming the streets imminently, but a fungal "pandemic" could come to pass in the next few years. CDC fungal expert Dr Ian Hennessee said the Blastomyces species of fungus is a cause for concer.

Dr Hennessee said: "We are encouraging people to think about fungus because these fungi are out there. They often are rare, but when people get them, they're oftentimes misdiagnosed and underreported. And that can cause really severe disease. There's lots of quality news coming out of the US.

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"The Last of Us brought the fungal diseases [to the fore]. They're often not the first ones that the clinician will even think of."

Fungal entities love warmer temperatures, which means that climate change is helping make the threat of widespread disease more possible. Dr Hennessee told the Mail: "As we see changing environmental conditions, we are concerned about changing distribution, or even the impact of some of these fungal diseases, not just blastomycosis, some of the other ones, histoplasmosis, valley fever and things like that."

The CDC website informs that, in severe cases, blastomycosis can spread from the lungs to the skin, bones, and joints, leading to painful lesions and boils. A 29-year-old, Ian Pritchard, from Michigan became one of the first US residents to die because of breathing difficulties caused by this fungus.

Meanwhile, in 2020, Ira Walker was hospitalized for a month when medical professionals had to create an opening through his neck to his trachea due to this infection. Fungal diseases in the US are on an upward trend, with reported cases rising from 4,746 in 2018 to 7,199 in 2021. Dr Hennessee is worried about this growth, saying: "We might see it in areas outside of what we considered its historically endemic range," reports the Daily Star .

"We've never really seen it in a big industrial setting before [the Michigan outbreak] so it's possible sometimes we'll see it in other in other areas where we just didn't."

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