Fungi: Yet Another Growing Threat to Humanity

 We are constantly reminded that our bodies exist in a swarm of microbes, some of which are critical parts of our bodies resulting from evolving in this swarm.  Pathogens occasionally enter our environment and cause problems.  Mostly they have been viruses and bacteria.  Emily Monosson, in her book Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, reminds us that there is another class of microbe, fungi, that is also part of the surrounding swarm.  She describes new forms of fungi that may be developing and spreading due to global warming.

Monosson tells us that there are an estimated six million or more different species of fungi, much more than the number of plant and animal species.  Their main function seems to be the breaking down of dead or once-living matter into its components for future use.

“Most fungi live if not in collaboration, then in peace with other living things.  But some do not.  Some feed on the living rather than the dead and dying.  Most fungi give life; fungal pathogens take it.”

“Some disease-causing fungi can survive in the environment for days or months or years even without a host.  Unlike many other pathogenic microbes, fungal spores can be remarkably persistent, and each single spore carries the instructions for a next generation of mold, mildew, smut, or myriad other fungi.”

“Collectively, infectious fungi and fungus-like pathogens are the most devastating disease agents known on the planet.  The incidence of novel fungal diseases across species, including humans, has risen over the past century.”

Like other of the Earth’s microbes, fungi evolve over time as they look for new hosts to invade.  Infectious diseases will find a host and generally devastate the population, but not necessarily eliminate it.  A few specimens will possess genetic makeups that allow them to survive the onslaught and rebuild a population that can survive the endemic pathogen.  What is dangerous is when hosts are unknowingly transported across the globe where the pathogen finds plenty of new hosts to infect, leading to a pandemic.

“The pandemics and epidemics I write about in these pages all began with a fungus that was moved from its home environment to a completely new setting where it happened upon a suitable host.  There are a lot of fungi in the world.  Although most are harmless, a few can cause utter devastation when provided with a novel and susceptible host.  Our job going forward will be to prevent the potentially harmful fungi from meeting the susceptible host—including us.”

Much of what Monosson discusses relates to plant life.  Trees and other foliage are in constant danger of infection.  Agricultural crops have always had to contend with unruly fungi.  Recent fungal infections have appeared among bats and amphibians, decimating their populations and spreading across the globe. 

Could something similar happen to humans?  The author’s book title suggests an answer in the affirmative.  Has something changed to make fungal infections more likely?  Perhaps so.  Consider that our mammalian body with its high temperature microbiome has provided an inhospitable environment for fungi.

“For much of our existence our microbiome has helped to keep potentially invasive microbes—particularly those already in residence—in check.  Most of those microbes are bacteria that in both number and diversity have the fungi beat.  There is a good reason for this: our body temperature.  Many bacteria thrive at 37ºC (98.6ºF), the normal human internal temperature, but for many fungi our bodies are like Death Valley.  Most fungi prefer temperatures between 12ºC (53.6ºF) to 30ºC (86ºF).  We mammals simply run too hot.  Like a healthy microbiome, our warmth protects us from fungal invasion.  But now some scientists worry that our so-called temperature barrier is beginning to fail us.”

What has changed recently is that the climate has become warmer in most locations, providing more opportunities for fungi to develop a tolerance for higher temperatures.  And regions where high-temperature fungal infections already exist can spread into new regions with fresh potential hosts.

“In 2010 [Arturo] Casedevall and Monica Garcia-Solache coauthored an opinion piece for a scientific journal.  They hypothesized that warmer temperatures would alter and likely increase the geographic range of disease-causing fungi and likely select for new fungi pathogens with higher tolerances for a warm body.  In 2019, less than a decade later, Casadevell and colleagues suggested that the emergence of C. Auris may be the first example of a climate-enabled novel human fungal pathogen.”

C. Auris is short for Candida auris, a form of yeast that was first observed as an infection in relatively cool ears in 2006.  By 2009 it was observed to have entered the blood stream of three people, killing two of them.  In 2015, a fungal outbreak in Pakistan led to the CDC identifying C. Auris as the culprit.

“A year later C. Auris began popping up in other locales around the globe, including a handful of cases, diagnosed retrospectively, in the United States, which is when the CDC issued its first warning about the emergent disease.  Once the warning went out, other cases were identified.  Hundreds of cases in the United States and thousands of cases globally have since been reported.”

“In April 2019 the New York Times published a story about a patient who had been hospitalized at Mount Sinai in Brooklyn, New York, with C Auris.  He died three months later.  By then the yeast had colonized the entire room.  Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president told the Times that ‘everything was positive—the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump.  The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive’.”

The mortality rate for infected patients varies between 30 and 60 percent.  Various strains of C. Auris exist, with resistance to most or all antifungal drugs.

C. Auris is an example of a suddenly appearing new pathogen; more are likely to follow.  Others already exist and appear to be growing in infection rate.  Valley Fever is a fungal disease endemic to warm and dry climates of the southwestern US and Mexico.  It is expected to spread throughout the western states in the coming decades.  During the covid pandemic, India saw a huge growth of cases of the fungal disease mucormycosis.  Thousands of cases emerged with a mortality rate of 85 percent.

New fungal strains are decimating bat and amphibian populations.  Thus far, humans have been spared a pandemic, but the fungi are gathering strength, and one might be inevitable.

 

 

Health and Justice: Individuals Versus Society

 Linda Greenhouse produced an intriguing article for the New York Review of Books: An Unhealthy Definition of Rights.  In it she discusses a book by Wendy E. Parmet: Constitutional Contagion: Covid, the Courts, and Public Health.  Greenhouse presented a startling Supreme Court Ruling that seems to conclude that the Constitution owes we citizens nothing in terms of protection from “private actors.”  The particular case was DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989).

“In this case, the father of a four-year-old boy was known by government social service workers to be abusing his son, yet the county failed to remove the boy from his custody. A final beating left the boy severely brain-damaged. The question was whether the government’s failure to act on its knowledge violated the child’s constitutional right to due process. Rejecting the claim, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the majority:

Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors. The Clause is phrased as a limitation on the State’s power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security.”

This Constitutional failure has long been recognized but had not been seen as an impediment to government taking actions to protect its citizens.  That has begun to change as the Court has swung to more extreme conservative legal theories.

“…the fact remains that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are for the most part negative rights against government interference rather than positive rights to government-provided goods or services. This feature of American constitutionalism has been widely observed and continually contested. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for ‘a second Bill of Rights,’ one that would include guarantees to the right to ‘a useful and remunerative job,’ ‘a decent home,’ ‘adequate medical care,’ ‘a good education,’ and ‘the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.’ Cass R. Sunstein, in The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever (2004), wrote that the address ‘has a strong claim to being the greatest speech of the twentieth century’.” 

The interpretation by Rehnquist and his colleagues became dominant during the legal arguments over Covid pandemic actions and overturned a long history of government regulation arguing that there were limits on personal liberties if those actions endangered others.  Consider the history of vaccine mandates.

“Vaccine requirements are nothing new; George Washington required soldiers in the Continental Army to be vaccinated against smallpox. Nor is resistance to them a historical anomaly. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court decision that established the legal framework for dealing with vaccine resistance, dates to 1905 and stems from an individual’s refusal to accept a required smallpox vaccine.”

“By a vote of 7–2, the justices upheld Jacobson’s conviction with a ringing endorsement of vaccine mandates in service of the public good. ‘There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in the majority opinion.

Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.

In Harlan’s words, this ‘liberty regulated by law’ was the ‘fundamental principle of the social compact’.”

When the pandemic struck the Supreme Court’s legal bias was toward a quite different interpretation of individual rights, particularly when religion was the issue.  Alerting the public to this change and its consequences was the purpose of Parmet’s book.

“She places on display an American exceptionalism of a particularly disquieting form: a legal mindset that has come to value individual freedom over communal welfare and so has ‘lost sight of contagion’s most compelling lesson: Our own health depends on the health of others’.”

Consider one noteworthy case that was argued during the pandemic.

“In January 2022 a federal district judge barred the navy from penalizing a group of SEALs who claimed religious reasons for refusing the Covid vaccine. Parmet notes this astonishing case, but without giving the details that demonstrate how far away from the ‘rich liberty’ of the Jacobson case the legal system was moving not even two years into the pandemic. The district court decision’s list of the SEALs’ rationales for refusing to be vaccinated included the ‘belief that modifying one’s body is an affront to the Creator’ and ‘direct, divine instruction not to receive the vaccine.’ The navy argued that the requested waivers would render the SEALs nondeployable, to the detriment of military readiness and the national defense. Judge Reed O’Connor was unmoved. ‘The Plaintiffs’ loss of religious liberties outweighs any forthcoming harm to the Navy,’ he concluded.”

The case became moot when the Navy ultimately withdrew the order, but the precedent set was alarming to say the least.  While the focus of the article is on health issues, the elevation of individual liberty (or license) above the needs of society is troubling in an even greater arena.

A group of soldiers decided to disobey an order because they didn’t agree with it and the court told them they had done the right thing.  What might the future consequences be if soldiers’ religious or political beliefs convince them they need not obey an order. 

Humans live in groups because they learned, over the course of evolution, that groups provided individuals with a higher level of protection than they could provide themselves.  Individuals support the group because they know the group will be there to support them.  Thus, the notion that an individual’s liberties can be more important than the good of the community is rather nonhuman, and unlikely to have been an intention of our group leaders (our Founding fathers).  Further, the notion that religious freedoms seem to be weakening the bond between individuals and other members of society is particularly troubling.  Religions are inherently discriminatory, dividing a group into subsets of believers and nonbelievers.  These subsets can coexist provided one does not attempt to impose its beliefs on others.  Unfortunately, such a tendency seems inevitable when religious groups seek political power in order to dominate the community.  This always damages the group, leading to social and physical conflicts.  Human history is replete with examples of societies descending into dark times from corruption of leadership by the religious, or of wars being waged between different religious groups.

The grasping for power by religious groups in our country is a major source of the polarization that has unsettled our nation and rendered our federal government inoperative.  The current Supreme Court justices seem determined to support the polarization of our political system by propagating their own religious biases.  This cannot end well.

 

Israel and Germany: The Tangled Desires for Ethnic Cleansing

 The history of Germany and Jews has continued since the end of the original Nazi era, leading to a surprising accommodation between Israel and Germany as they now collaborate to accomplish ethnic cleansing of Muslim peoples in their territories.  Pankaj Mishra provides an overview of this political activity in an article for the London Review of Books: Memory Failure.  Mishra writes as a reviewer of the book Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany by  Esra Özyürek.  After the war, each country had a need for the other.  For Germany, an embrace and support of Israel would help diminish the stain from its antisemitic history and accelerate its acceptance as a member of the international community.  Israel would need economic, military, and political help as it set out to solidify its position and demonize Arabic enemies.  As both countries now move further towards the right, they benefit from arguments that Muslim peoples are the worst propagators of antisemitism.  Ideally, for both nations, it would be advantageous to convince the world that Muslims are worse than Hitler’s Nazis.

Konrad Adenauer, in 1960, is identified as the initiator of this symbiotic relationship.

“Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.”

“As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany’s ‘international standing’, adding that ‘the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated’.”

The deal was sealed during the Eichmann trial when the Israelis chose to protect rather than out the Nazi background of one of Adenauer’s closest advisors, Hans Globke.  The arrangement included:

“…moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons.”

“It also suited both countries to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (‘Hitler on the Nile’), as the true embodiments of Nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke ‘had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis’. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as ‘decent’, made no ‘mention of decent Arabs.”

The mutual demonization of Arabs/Muslims continues to this day with the events of October 7^th pushing both countries to extremes.

“In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims.”

“…despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation’, according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining’.”

“Both Judaeophobia and Islamophobia have increased in Germany in the wake of the Hamas attack, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on Gaza and the German government’s crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they rejected antisemitism. Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on ‘unchecked immigration’. To denounce Germany’s Muslim minority as ‘the major carriers of antisemitism’, as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly ‘90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans’.”

Netanyahu has long been busy setting the stage for the ethnic cleansing he desires.

“Netanyahu, too, has learned from Germany’s postwar efforts at whitewashing. In 2015 he claimed that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded Hitler to murder rather than simply expel the Jews. Three years later, after initially criticising a move by the Law and Justice Party in Poland to criminalise references to Polish collaboration, he endorsed the law making such references punishable by a fine. He has since legitimised Shoah revisionism in Lithuania and Hungary, commending both countries for their valiant struggle against antisemitism. (Efraim Zuroff, a historian who has helped bring many former Nazis to trial, compared this to ‘praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving racial relations in the South’.) More recently, Netanyahu accompanied Elon Musk to one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, just days after Musk tweeted in support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Since 7 October, he has seemed to be reading from the Eichmann trial script. He regularly announces that he is fighting the ‘new Nazis’ in Gaza in order to save ‘Western civilisation’, while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists keep up a supporting chorus. The people of Gaza are ‘subhuman’, ‘animals’, ‘Nazis’.

Mishra, given the texts he was reviewing, focuses more on the dangerous direction in which Germany is moving by joining with Israel in promoting islamophobia.

“In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.’ German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that ‘German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.’ But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.”

Observing that Israel is collaborating with the nation that sought to annihilate Jews as an unwanted minority so that Jews can eliminate another unwanted minority, leaves one stunned and horrified.