Tag Archives: fungus

Pathogen Time Part 2

Continuing from where I left off yesterday…Once upon a time there was my brother. My brother lived in a large closet for a year in college because, well, COLLEGE. Also, broke. At some point he got sick (like ya do when you’re on a trimester system and taking exams every few weeks), then he got sicker and then a doctor took a chest X-ray. Apparently my brother’s lungs had taken to raising fungi for fun and profit. Except it wasn’t fun and the doctor cost money. This was also when we found out about the discovery of black mold in his house. Yaaaay…Anyway, the story ends happily because whatever had set up camp in my brother was not actually black mold and eventually went away. How did this happen in the first place? Well, if bacteria are zombies and viruses are spies, fungi are aliens. Pathogenic fungi are like aliens conducting a disorganized and under-planned invasion of your body; like Superman’s parents, they want to send their little babies/spores off in escape pods to grow somewhere safe (and damp and warm and probably rotting). Except instead of a farm or even a nice rotting log, their kids end up in fungi equivalent of a space beast. Unfortunately for the space beast (you), lungs and other soft, damp tissues can grow fungi pretty well. Tissues like your eyes, sinuses, bones, lining of the heart and brain. I know, right? BRAIN MOLD. Even a common mold like Cladosporidium can really ruin your shit. Our bodies can reject spores and other foreign particles with coughing and sneezing, but the immune system can do a pretty good job of kicking the confused aliens out. Failing that, anti-fungals are a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Prions, I don’t even know what kind of video game prions would work in. They. Are. Nasty. Shit. For a while, believing in prions was like being That Guy in the medical community. You know, the one whispering conspiracy theories in the break room about how anesthesia had tracking chips in it and scrubs were a symbol of The Man. Because prions are only proteins, similar to ones you already possess yet capable of knocking other cerebral proteins completely off kilter, it seemed ludicrous to suggest a “protein infection” would cause loss of motor skills, dementia, convulsions and death. No DNA as in viruses, nothing. Thankfully, researchers Tikvah Alper and John Stanley Griffith did not mind being Those Guys for a while until support mounted for their hypothesis on the infectious agents of scrapie (a sheep disease) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (human mad cow disease). There is no cure, but mind you have to try a bit to catch a prion. They live in nervous tissue and transmit orally, but since the discovery of mad cow, the butchering and feeding of beef cattle has been carefully regulated to prevent further outbreak. Also, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not a sheep (or at least you’re a very talented sheep) so scrapie is out, and you’re most likely not a cannibal, so kuru is out too. Fun fact: in the post-apocalyptic movie Book of Eli, the main characters can indentify cannibals because they’ve got “the shakes”, meaning that they have kuru from eating too many people and not being picky about nervous tissue. Anyway, I thought that was a cool detail.

Oh, I didn’t include parasites? Well now, maybe I’ve got something planned. Y’all will just have to see.

 

 

Source

-. 2010. GRE Subject Test: Biology 5th Ed. Kaplan, New York.

-. 2012. “Other Pathogenic Fungi”. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 13 Feb 2013. <http://www.cdc.gov/fungal/other/&gt;