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Last of us jokes aside, how correct is the claim that fungis do not pose a strategic threat to mankind or human civilization because humans used to live in much

Last of us jokes aside, how correct is the claim that fungis do not pose a strategic threat to mankind or human civilization because humans used to live in much unhealthier conditions and if a fungi could have wiped us out, it would already have? This is why I'm not too concerned about pandemics. We used to be cave dwellers, to live alongside animals. Nature had plenty of opportunities to wipe us out when we were at our weakest, and it failed. Unless a novel disease emerges or is manufactured that totally outclasses everything nature came up with in earth's history, we're going to be fine.

SantalBlush 4y ago
If you're genuinely interested, you'd be better off getting up to speed on the current research instead of putting forth extremely rudimentary theories.
roflyear 4y ago
Hard for things to spread when you're small groups of people without interaction with anyone outside your group. And yes small groups of people were routinely completely wiped out.
mjhay 4y ago
Something doesn't have to be capable of being an existential threat to civilization to be considered "bad."
DFHippie 4y ago
> Nature had plenty of opportunities to wipe us out when we were at our weakest, and it failed. But that wasn't when we were at our weakest, not necessarily. Diseases need to spread. When we lived in scattered hunter gatherer groups it was really tough for diseases to spread, and if they couldn't spread, it was difficult for them to persist in a population and evolve. Now the spreading is easy. Furthermore, spreading is easier among certain animal populations because we raise them packed into warehouses and we ship them around the world via truck, train, boat, and plane. The world is a very different place, so using the past as a model to predict the future is dicey.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  The black plague managed to wipe out a third of Europe long before the advent of modern transportation technology.
  - soiler 4y ago
    But long after the taming of horses, the invention of roadways and carts, and the proliferation of dense urban areas. "International" trade has surely always existed - we know people far from the sea decorated their bodies with cowrie shells in prehistoric ages. But the scale of contact and interaction has not remained constant. Arguably, the Middle Ages is when Eurasian society was at its weakest WRT disease.
    - yareally 4y ago
      The Plague of Justinian (the first major instance of the disease) in the 6th Century wiped out at least 40% of the population of Constantinople--the largest and most advanced city in Europe at the time. It's estimated it wiped out 25-60% of the population of Europe over the course of 2 centuries (15-100 million people). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
  - bigbillheck 4y ago
    You might be surprised at how much land and sea trade was going on across Eurasia at the time.
    - GalenErso 4y ago
      I know, and that's my point. Global transportation isn't a new thing. Nature had a window of opportunity of about one thousand years or two to deal with us and we're still here and kicking.
vecter 4y ago
There are two factors now which make things different: 1. As other commenters have pointed out, the ease of spread of any disease is orders of magnitude higher now than it was during cave-man days. With crowded cities, public transit, and air travel, pandemic-level diseases can spread across the world in a matter of days or weeks. 2. Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. We are, in a sense, selectively breeding pathogens that are both good at infecting humans and resistant to our treatments. That is a focused selective pressure that has never existed before, and may pose the biggest threat to us in the next 50-100 years. For a concrete example, look at this experiment which shows how quickly bacteria can evolve to overcome levels of antibiotics that are orders of magnitude more than we would ever give a human [0]. Yes, there will generally always be some subset of the human population that is resistant to any particular disease, but our measure of success is not "5% of humans will survive the next pandemic, so we're all good, let's it move along nothing to see here." If we start to regularly have drug-resistant pathogens that make hospital stays very dangerous for patients (imagine having a 1/3 or even 1/10 chance of dying at a hospital due to an infection entirely irrelevant to your condition) or just more common COVID-level pandemics, that would be a serious disruption to humanity, significantly increase general mortality rates across the board, and drastically change life as we know it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M
- moremetadata 4y ago
  [dead]
- bawolff 4y ago
  > Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. I don't think that makes sense when comparing against the threat level of pre-antimicrobial times. It didn't matter that they weren't resistant before we had antimicrobial drugs. Lack of resistence was useless in cave man times.
- iknowstuff 4y ago
idontwantthis 4y ago
Surprised no one has already mentioned climate change. The truly terrifying thing is that the reason fungi have not been a big threat to humans is that there was not evolutionary pressure for them to thrive in human body temperatures. Now, due to the warming climate there is immense pressure. As fungi evolve to adapt to the warming climate, they are evolving to be able to infect and kill us.
- eggy 4y ago
  Yes, climate change is the culprit for all ills, or at least that's what you read everywhere ;) Climate change was mentioned on "The Last of Us" episode 1, at the start. Aside from fictional references, there are fungi that can grow outside of 70-90F up to 130-150F. I believe COVID and people rushing to the hospital emergency room for everything instead of going to their PMC may have had something to do with this fungus finding purchase to infect more people.
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6650554/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6650554/
    - eggy 4y ago
      << it may be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change, with the caveat that many other factors may have contributed.>> Significant or not? <<many other factors may have contributed>> <<The most enigmatic aspect of the rise of Candida auris as a human pathogen is that it emerged simultaneously on three continents, >> I would be interested to know if COVID happened everywhere around the same time relatively speaking, with people self-quarantining while all running to the emergency room of hospitals, might explain the "enigma" above.
      - wahern 4y ago
        Yeah, that paper is trash. There's zero evidence provided. In fact, they literally suggest that somebody else should find evidence to support their conclusion: > The hypothesis that C. auris broke the mammalian thermal barrier through adaptation to climate change suggests several experimental lines of investigation to obtain evidence for and against it. Nonetheless, they still cite to earlier papers (multiple!) of theirs to argue that they "predicted" their current speculative conclusion; for example, > Given the capacity of fungal species to adapt to higher temperatures and the fact that many fungal species that are currently nonpathogenic species are likely to have the necessary virulence attributes by virtue of their survival in soils, we previously hypothesized that climate change would bring new fungal diseases And in case anybody missed it (as I did, initially), the entire body of this "paper" is under the header, "OPINION/HYPOTHESIS".
endtime 4y ago
> Unless a novel disease emerges or is manufactured that totally outclasses everything nature came up with in earth's history What makes you think this is unlikely? Even putting aside that bioengineering is a very real thing, there is historical precedent for terrible novel diseases (e.g. black death, Spanish flu). I'll also point out that "humanity is totally wiped out" and "we're going to be fine" are not exhaustive. A disease killing 10% of the world's population would not be fine.
bigbillheck 4y ago
> if a fungi could have wiped us out, it would already have If a fungus could have already wiped out entire amphibian species, why didn't it to so before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chytridiomycosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chytridiomycosis

SantalBlush 4y ago

If you're genuinely interested, you'd be better off getting up to speed on the current research instead of putting forth extremely rudimentary theories.

roflyear 4y ago

Hard for things to spread when you're small groups of people without interaction with anyone outside your group. And yes small groups of people were routinely completely wiped out.

mjhay 4y ago

Something doesn't have to be capable of being an existential threat to civilization to be considered "bad."

DFHippie 4y ago

> Nature had plenty of opportunities to wipe us out when we were at our weakest, and it failed. But that wasn't when we were at our weakest, not necessarily. Diseases need to spread. When we lived in scattered hunter gatherer groups it was really tough for diseases to spread, and if they couldn't spread, it was difficult for them to persist in a population and evolve. Now the spreading is easy. Furthermore, spreading is easier among certain animal populations because we raise them packed into warehouses and we ship them around the world via truck, train, boat, and plane. The world is a very different place, so using the past as a model to predict the future is dicey.

GalenErso 4y ago
The black plague managed to wipe out a third of Europe long before the advent of modern transportation technology.
- soiler 4y ago
  But long after the taming of horses, the invention of roadways and carts, and the proliferation of dense urban areas. "International" trade has surely always existed - we know people far from the sea decorated their bodies with cowrie shells in prehistoric ages. But the scale of contact and interaction has not remained constant. Arguably, the Middle Ages is when Eurasian society was at its weakest WRT disease.
  - yareally 4y ago
    The Plague of Justinian (the first major instance of the disease) in the 6th Century wiped out at least 40% of the population of Constantinople--the largest and most advanced city in Europe at the time. It's estimated it wiped out 25-60% of the population of Europe over the course of 2 centuries (15-100 million people). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  You might be surprised at how much land and sea trade was going on across Eurasia at the time.
  - GalenErso 4y ago
    I know, and that's my point. Global transportation isn't a new thing. Nature had a window of opportunity of about one thousand years or two to deal with us and we're still here and kicking.

vecter 4y ago

There are two factors now which make things different: 1. As other commenters have pointed out, the ease of spread of any disease is orders of magnitude higher now than it was during cave-man days. With crowded cities, public transit, and air travel, pandemic-level diseases can spread across the world in a matter of days or weeks. 2. Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. We are, in a sense, selectively breeding pathogens that are both good at infecting humans and resistant to our treatments. That is a focused selective pressure that has never existed before, and may pose the biggest threat to us in the next 50-100 years. For a concrete example, look at this experiment which shows how quickly bacteria can evolve to overcome levels of antibiotics that are orders of magnitude more than we would ever give a human [0]. Yes, there will generally always be some subset of the human population that is resistant to any particular disease, but our measure of success is not "5% of humans will survive the next pandemic, so we're all good, let's it move along nothing to see here." If we start to regularly have drug-resistant pathogens that make hospital stays very dangerous for patients (imagine having a 1/3 or even 1/10 chance of dying at a hospital due to an infection entirely irrelevant to your condition) or just more common COVID-level pandemics, that would be a serious disruption to humanity, significantly increase general mortality rates across the board, and drastically change life as we know it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M

moremetadata 4y ago
[dead]
bawolff 4y ago
> Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. I don't think that makes sense when comparing against the threat level of pre-antimicrobial times. It didn't matter that they weren't resistant before we had antimicrobial drugs. Lack of resistence was useless in cave man times.
iknowstuff 4y ago

idontwantthis 4y ago

Surprised no one has already mentioned climate change. The truly terrifying thing is that the reason fungi have not been a big threat to humans is that there was not evolutionary pressure for them to thrive in human body temperatures. Now, due to the warming climate there is immense pressure. As fungi evolve to adapt to the warming climate, they are evolving to be able to infect and kill us.

eggy 4y ago
Yes, climate change is the culprit for all ills, or at least that's what you read everywhere ;) Climate change was mentioned on "The Last of Us" episode 1, at the start. Aside from fictional references, there are fungi that can grow outside of 70-90F up to 130-150F. I believe COVID and people rushing to the hospital emergency room for everything instead of going to their PMC may have had something to do with this fungus finding purchase to infect more people.
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6650554/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6650554/
  - eggy 4y ago
    << it may be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change, with the caveat that many other factors may have contributed.>> Significant or not? <<many other factors may have contributed>> <<The most enigmatic aspect of the rise of Candida auris as a human pathogen is that it emerged simultaneously on three continents, >> I would be interested to know if COVID happened everywhere around the same time relatively speaking, with people self-quarantining while all running to the emergency room of hospitals, might explain the "enigma" above.
    - wahern 4y ago
      Yeah, that paper is trash. There's zero evidence provided. In fact, they literally suggest that somebody else should find evidence to support their conclusion: > The hypothesis that C. auris broke the mammalian thermal barrier through adaptation to climate change suggests several experimental lines of investigation to obtain evidence for and against it. Nonetheless, they still cite to earlier papers (multiple!) of theirs to argue that they "predicted" their current speculative conclusion; for example, > Given the capacity of fungal species to adapt to higher temperatures and the fact that many fungal species that are currently nonpathogenic species are likely to have the necessary virulence attributes by virtue of their survival in soils, we previously hypothesized that climate change would bring new fungal diseases And in case anybody missed it (as I did, initially), the entire body of this "paper" is under the header, "OPINION/HYPOTHESIS".

endtime 4y ago

> Unless a novel disease emerges or is manufactured that totally outclasses everything nature came up with in earth's history What makes you think this is unlikely? Even putting aside that bioengineering is a very real thing, there is historical precedent for terrible novel diseases (e.g. black death, Spanish flu). I'll also point out that "humanity is totally wiped out" and "we're going to be fine" are not exhaustive. A disease killing 10% of the world's population would not be fine.

bigbillheck 4y ago

> if a fungi could have wiped us out, it would already have If a fungus could have already wiped out entire amphibian species, why didn't it to so before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chytridiomycosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chytridiomycosis