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Death by fungi

Over recent years we've been regularly assaulted by media reports of looming pandemics.

SARS, bird flu, Ebola -- the list grows longer every day and we're constantly told that these viruses are poised on the verge of mutating to the extent that they will be passed from human to human, thus producing a crisis that will rival or exceed that caused by the Spanish Flu epidemic early last century.

Fortunately, despite all the media's doomsaying, no such pandemic has yet appeared and we have remained safe... for the time being.

However, perhaps the biggest threat to mankind's very survival as a species will not not come from viruses but from fungi.

Read this interesting CNN story on how a hyper-aggressive mutating fungus is causing the extinction of vertebrates.

The most worrying aspect of this story is that this fungus (chytridiomycosis) has recombinant DNA making it "the worst infectious disease ever recorded among vertebrates in terms of the number of species impacted and its propensity to drive them to extinction"

Oh, that's nasty!

This pathogen seems to make Ebola, bird-flu and all the others look like minor ailments both at an individual and species-wide level.

Today frogs...tomorrow humans?

Perhaps, perhaps not.

I'm wondering if this report is just another media hype-fest where some journalist, looking for some sizzle, has drawn some long bows from a few scientific papers.

We've been reading reports for over a decade now that frog populations were being decimated by fungal diseases but if nature is true to form, a balance will be found and although some species may be badly affected, the level of natural immunity which occurs as a result of genetic diversity, will ensure that some survive and breed.

Just as when the Spanish Flu killed huge numbers of people, those with natural immunity survived and went on to strengthen the human race as a species -- by reproducing those resilient genes.

Mind you, in an era when we are finding our antibiotics to be increasingly powerless in the face of resistant bacterial infections, perhaps the last thing we need is a virulent fungus that is constantly mutating and adapting to new hosts.

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