A new fungal infection called Rhodosporidiobolus fulvialis Scientists said in June that the virus had recently been found in two patients in China.
The infections were found in samples from two separate hospital patients. according to At temperatures similar to those in the human body, R. fluvialis has evolved into “hypervirulent mutants” in lab mice that are resistant to many first-line antifungal drugs, including fluconazole and caspofungin, according to a study published in Nature Microbiology.
The researchers discovered the infectious agent while testing fungi from patient samples taken from 96 hospitals across China between 2009 and 2019. Of the 27,100 strains the team collected and analyzed, R. fluuvialis was the only one that had never been seen in humans.
Fungal outbreaks are a real threat https://t.co/jc5THes3Mb
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 15, 2023
“This is a surprising and really unexpected finding and it bodes ill for the future,” said David Denning, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Manchester. Said Science cited Fisher, who said he was “not involved in the study,” but Matthew Fisher, professor of fungal diseases at Imperial College London, seemed to disagree: “My initial impression is that there is an unexplored environment in China that harbors these yeasts, and that these two patients were unlucky enough to have been infected by them,” he told Science.
Fungal infections are thought to most commonly affect people with weakened immune systems, such as those with HIV or taking immunosuppressants. The researchers did not say whether infection played a role in the deaths, other than that each had been treated with antifungal medication. (Related: Terrifying study finds fungal disease outbreaks becoming more common among humans)
Both patients studied had severe underlying medical conditions and had been admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU), but were otherwise unrelated. The first was a 61-year-old man from Nanjing who died in 2013 and was immunosuppressed. The other was an 85-year-old man from Tianjin who died in 2016 at the age of 85. The patient had diabetes, which interfered with immune function.
