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A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
- everdrive 4mo agoEverything is spreading. We're a large interconnected world, and we'll inherit everyone's problems eventually. There are better alternatives, but it's not something people will seriously consider.
- mc32 4mo agoWhat are the alternatives people rather avoid considering?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- rob74 4mo agoNot the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.
- hagbard_c 4mo agoYou first? Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.
- rob74 4mo agoSorry if that wasn't obvious, I wasn't proposing it, I just wanted to come up with an example of a solution that "no one would seriously consider".
- symian 4mo agoWe are in the midst of a great extinction event. It’s the only extinction event caused by one species. We are quite bad for the planet’s ecosystem and things like factory farming of cows and pigs cause great suffering. Having far fewer humans on the planet would be a great benefit to other species and to humanity.
- N_Lens 4mo agoDont worry! With AI powered robotics it’ll only take a tiny fraction of humans to create many times more ‘impact’!
- hagbard_c 4mo agoWe're not in the midst of a great extinction event and even if we were it would not be the first one caused by a single species. Probably the first one was caused by the appearance of Cyanobacteria some 2.7 billion years ago which started to make use of sunlight through photosynthesis. A few hundred million years later the produced oxygen started seeping into the atmosphere and boom, nearly all anaerobic life on the planet was wiped out. We are part of the ecosystem no matter how much you try to deny it. The planet will abide, humans most likely as well. If you want to call for fewer humans on the planet - something which seems to be the future anyway since births are rapidly declining almost everywhere - that's fine but realise you're just following others like Malthus who did so before. Malthus was proven wrong many times over, you will be proven wrong as well since if there's one thing humans are good at it is adapting to a changing environment. If it gets colder humans adapt, that's how we made it through the series of glaciations. If it gets warmer humans adapt, that's how we made it through e.g. the Roman and Viking age warm periods.
- symian 4mo agoOk, it’s the first mass extinction event caused by a single species in the last 1.99 billion years. We are shitting all over the planet. It’s not a matter of warm or cold but of toxifying the entire planet. It’s a matter of what type of environment we want to live in. Merely existing is dehumanizing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- elzbardico 4mo agoThere's no such thing as introducing species where they don't belong. Ecosystem are dynamic, several other animals serve as vectors for transporting species from a place to another. There's no such thing as a long term static equilibria where godess gaia looks like a Jehova's witnesses book illustration. This is an incredibly cultish and misanthropic position.
- soiltype 4mo agoThis is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doing is no big deal.
- elzbardico 4mo agoNatural boundary crossing isn't rare; it's the mechanism that built much of the biosphere. Every fucking oceanic island on Earth, Hawaii, the Galápagos, New Zealand, the Mascarenes, was stocked entirely by organisms that crossed open ocean or sky without any help from us. The entire South American primate and caviomorph rodent lineages (everything from capuchins to capybaras) descend from African ancestors that rafted across the Atlantic on vegetation mats roughly 40 million years ago. When the Isthmus of Panama closed (~3 million years ago), North American placental mammals poured south and drove a large fraction of South America's endemic fauna—native ungulates, many marsupial lineages—to extinction. Yeah. Some species get crowded out, maybe we should avoid that in a lot of cases, but is not the capital sin western people have been brainwashed to believe it when they replaced their christianism with new age Gaia worship. Species get extinct, eco-systems change, sometimes it is worth preventing that, in other, who fucking cares?
- soiltype 4mo agoRare is relative. Those changes all happened over much longer timescales and with far fewer species involved in a given ecosystem. It's not the same thing as what we're doing. You're making essentially the same argument as "Earth's climate has always been changing, what's the big deal?" The big deal is that when a species becomes invasive, the effects can cascade. You don't just lose their direct competitors and their prey, you can lose anything they pollinate, nest in, are nested in, etc. You can replace a diverse ecosystem with a near-monoculture. Of course, if you don't hold the fundamental belief that biodiversity is Good, and is Better than raw biomass increase, I see why this doesn't bother you, but I do hold that position.
- rvba 4mo agoProbably something about walls or methods used by political systems that built walls.
- andreime 4mo agoPlease name a better alternative, I'm very curious.
- symian 4mo agoA system that prices in cost of negative externalities is better than what we have now. A system that caps how much wealth a person can have is a better system that what we now have. A system that prevents the exportation of pollution is a better system than what we have now. These are opinions and I understand not everyone has these same beliefs.
- everdrive 4mo agoOne where people don't travel very much.
- shahsjsjjsz 4mo agoNot having cats is an option that is not seriously considered. Dogs are even worse. Make them shit in your own backyard please. If you are a city dweller please do not keep “pets”, it’s bloody ridiculous, thank you.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- whatevaa 4mo ago[flagged]
- nemomarx 4mo agoWe've been keeping pets as a species for considerably longer than we've had cities. It's basically an ingrained part of how we react to animals now.
- lenerdenator 4mo agoBeyond that, longer than we've had the written word. Domestication of animals might be the single greatest achievement of humans.
- soiltype 4mo agoAren't cities older than writing?
- wafflemaker 4mo agoIn dwarf fortress you can have dragons as pets. Never got there, tho I think I will train dogs in my current fortress.
- manarth 4mo agoSadly not known to breathe fire, but on the plus side, less likely to burn your house down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogona
- happytoexplain 4mo agoDon't be ominous. Just say things or refrain from posting.
- elzbardico 4mo agoDo you live in the American continent? Look at the skin tone of most people you find in the streets. Go to a library and try to find out what was the average skin tone in your region 600 years ago. Compare both. Thinks have been spreading for quite a while. Migratory species are older than ourselves. Jet stream can carry spores over oceans. World commerce is older than you think. Wars and migratory movements has always been a part of our civilization.
- everdrive 4mo ago>World commerce is older than you think. I'm aware that trade networks long precede recorded history, and potentially precede fully-modern humans. The fact that you can have homsapien admixture (eg: homo sapiens + denisovans) far, far outside of Africa is proof enough for that. The time scales did use to be different, and speeding things up as much as possible does not seem to be a good thing.
- simonebrunozzi 4mo agoReminds me of the TV Series "The Last of us" [0], which: "... is set decades after the collapse of society caused by a mass fungal infection that transforms its hosts into zombie-like creatures". Of course, minus the zombies. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)
- phyzix5761 4mo agoYou mean the video games?
- recursive-call 4mo agoThere is also a TV adaptation that came out on Netflix a few years ago.
- Ralfp 4mo agoIt's HBO Original actually
- Sharlin 4mo agoI guess GP is hinting that referring to TLoS as a TV series is a bit similar to, say, referring to LotR as a movie series (when discussing the basic premise shared by the original and the adaptation).
- thebruce87m 4mo agoReminds me of this scene: https://clip.cafe/airheads-1994/uh-67-copies-of-moby-dick/?srsltid=AfmBOopAByGCkICQAkStmX_Yd5DTNSqnPpxETLRt4ftIncMnyBgiMuDv https://clip.cafe/airheads-1994/uh-67-copies-of-moby-dick/?s...
- userulluipeste 4mo agoWe are lucky that mass epidemics that plagued humans so far didn't affect the brain. Affections like rabies, that require individuals biting each other, and which are the inspirational source of all those zombie fantasies, do not count. That is an attack vector easy to spot and manage. The scary scenario is the one like with this Sporothrix Brasiliensis fungus, which can spread by merely "sneezing out the infectious yeast", and then remain potent (outside a host) for "up to 10 weeks", plus (the cherry on top) -- "developing the disease three years after" the infection event. Any kind of pandemic is scary by the sheer magnitude of its reach, but one that would affect the brain? That would be another level of scary.
- swader999 4mo agoWe need lock downs, a wall, 100% containment. Full vaccine mobilization. Starship must be expedited. A world without cats is not a world at all.
- croes 4mo agoA world with cats is a world with billions of dead birds and small mammals. Without them we will have even more insects. So this time cats won’t protect us from diseases by killing the carrier, these time they help the carriers
- mb_thd 4mo agoThey still kill carriers for other stuff. Pick your poison, I guess.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoWouldn’t we have less insects because of increased bird, rodent and spider growth?
- zeristor 4mo agoLess insecticide is probably the key thing. Driving in the eighties with windscreens full of insects, and now hardly anything, and a lot less of the things that lived on them.
- themaninthedark 4mo agoSometimes I wonder about that. The measure is number of insect impacts on windshields but is the car the same? If we use a more modern care would the increased aerodynamics prevent impacts as instead of punching through the air you are cutting through it? Have never read the full experimental setup and assumptions... I do know that I have less dead bug then when I was a kid...
- diegolas 4mo ago
- feverzsj 4mo agoDeadly to immunocompromised people. Basically everything could be deadly to them. Cats also rarely attack human proactively. So not really a big concern.
- kevlened 4mo agoIt can be airborne, lives on sanitized surfaces for up to 10 weeks, and may take 3 years for symptoms to appear. Still, it is more concerning for cats than humans.
- greenavocado 4mo agoHypochlorous acid (HOCl) is highly effective at killing Sporothrix fungi, including Sporothrix brasiliensis HOCl is the best non-toxic broad spectrum human compatible antimicrobial. I have been using it in many household applications since COVID started. It can be prepared by electrolysis of acidified (e.g. vinegar, but ideally pH 5.5, and inorganic acids make it last way longer at that pH, but they are more dangerous to handle) salt water (high margin of safety) or alternatively prepared by mixing highly diluted bleach with an diluted acid (low margin of safety) to target 20-2000 ppm depending on your delivery method (e.g. one tablespoon of bleach and vinegar into a gallon of water). If you are worried about the safety of this approach, note that far, far less chlorine gas is emitted when made this way than by ordinary bathroom cleaning with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner. The smell of HOCl is unique and completely different from chlorine gas. The small amount of chlorine gas emitted likes to sit on top of the surface of the water, but if this layer is blown away, the distinct smell of HOCl becomes apparent immediately. It smells like minty bubblegum or something more familiar: a swimming pool. The good news is when making HOCl for disinfection purposes 20-2000 ppm, only very small quantities of chlorine gas are evolved. They can be reduced further by shaking the closed container used to make it, further dissolving the gas into solution to make more HOCl. I run this solution in my humidifier at low concentrations to prevent microorganisms from growing in it. I also use the electrolysis method to accurately make very low concentrations for nasal rinses. Typically, 15-30 seconds from a $10 USB electrolyzer in salt water.
- 4mo ago
- MisterTea 4mo ago> “I’m convinced that half of the human cases that come from cats are people who are trying to stuff pills down their cat’s throats to treat the sporotrichosis,” Do yourself a favor, crush the pill and put it in food. Problem solved. Difficult with multiple cats but I had two and one needed medication so I put this little guys on a window sill he loved to perch on which the other cat didn't care to reach.
- pikminguy 4mo agoA. I have cats that don't go anywhere special that the other cats don't go so that doesn't work unless I supervise. B. It's difficult to make sure they get the entire dose, again unless you supervise. And good luck getting a cat to finish food they've decided they are done with. C. I have cats that are picky enough to ignore any food that has a crushed pill in it. They can always tell. Yes even if I use smelly food. D. Not all medications can be safely crushed. Slowly dissolving in the stomach could be an important aspect of the delivery.
- mschuster91 4mo ago> Slowly dissolving in the stomach could be an important aspect of the delivery. Depends on the coating - some coatings only dissolve once they are out of the strongly acidic stomach. Slow dissolution is used in retarded medication, which may or may not be coincident with targeting post-stomach delivery.
- pikminguy 4mo agoYeah I was trying to get the general point of "crushing the pill could interfere with effective delivery of the medicine" without getting too far into the weeds. Honestly it's usually fine and I do think mixing crushed pills with food is an important tool in a pet owners belt. It's just not the universal solution that was being implied.
- jsiepkes 4mo agoIts not always that easy. For example cerenia tastes very bitter for a cat. My cat will start drooling almost uncontrollably if he tastes it. He has a kidney condition and needs it for the rest of his life. I've tried crushing it, but he will then just ignore the food because of the bitter taste of the pill. Putting it in something like easy-pill will work a couple of times. Until he realizes the disgusting taste he is going to experience when eating the easy-pill. At that point you can't trick him anymore with an easy-pill. So the only way I can give it to him (without drama) is by putting it deep into his mouth so he never tastes it and immediately swallows it.
- dosisking 4mo agoIt's hard to take an article that uses the word 'ginormous' seriously
- abanana 4mo agoIt probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.
- bandofthehawk 4mo agoTechnical jargon like "gigantic" or "enormous"?
- helsinkiandrew 4mo agoI think quoting is fine, but it's surprising coming from a senior adviser at a U.S. Government department. > “What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- alpinisme 4mo agoThe article doesn’t. It quotes a CDC advisor who does.
- LargeWu 4mo agoIt's a perfectly cromulent word.
- doodlebugging 4mo agoI agree even though I use ginormous in normal conversation. In the right context it is fine, I just don't think this is the right context. I also find it hard to take an article seriously when its volume comparison employs "Olympic-sized swimming pools". I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership, which I hope they measure realistically under the assumption that the number of readers will always be close to half the number of eyeballs on the page. Otherwise they would be inflating readership and that would be misleading.
- rimworld 4mo ago[flagged]
- Chazprime 4mo agoCan survive weeks, months and even years?? That’s a little horrifying.
- gchamonlive 4mo agoMy cat's got a different kind of fungus, not sporotrichosis, but one that gives her sort of a "clown nose". We've been trying to treat it for years now and it always comes back. Every time the treatment takes 4-6 months with itraconazol.
- busssard 4mo agoWe will see more and more fungi infecting mammals in the coming years. Mammals and birds evolved higher body temperatures in part to protect from fungal infections. As most fungi are dying above 37°C. But a high temperature summer is a selection pressure on any mushroom trying to survive, and hence might evolve to survive 40° summers and thus also survive in our bodies. I really hope cordyceps is one of the last to do this step.
- N_Lens 4mo agoOne of the last, you say? The last of Us?
- kalenx 4mo agoNot sure about that. Outside temperature above 37 were common in many highly populated areas, even before "high temperature summer" (e.g., India, Indonesia, most of Brazil, etc.). If there was an actual selection pressure, we would have seen its results by now.
- MichaelZuo 4mo agoWould a daily peak above 37C counts for the parents point? It has to be longer term temperature I imagine.
- kevlened 4mo agoWe have already seen selection pressure results in Candida auris https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01397-19 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01397-19 (2019) https://radiolab.org/podcast/fungus-amungus https://radiolab.org/podcast/fungus-amungus (2020)
- Lanzaa 4mo agoHave we not? > there are many fungal infections that occur more frequently in tropical zones or are restricted to certain regions within the tropics [0] I worry that one of the large variety of fungal species not resistant to high temperature will evolve to be resistant and cause great harm to our society. Similar to the way animal spillover events, like covid-19, are so devastating. A novel pathogen introduced to a naive population. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9834271/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9834271/
- elzbardico 4mo agoPlease note that this is an extremely rare disease even in Brazil, where it came from. Asked my vet, and two cousins who also are vets, and all of them knew of the disease from scientific literature and government health bulletins, but only one of them had treated two actual cases, when he lived in northeastern region: two strays. Brasil must have something like between 40 and 50 million cats (including strays). An infectious disease that killed thousands (what the article means? 1000, 2000? 10000?) while not ignorable, it is not exactly highly prevalent.
- drdexebtjl 4mo agoThere’s also not enough data to say the number of human cases has been growing YOY because compulsory notification in Brazil only started in 2025.
- mlcruz 4mo agoIt is not that rare, the epidemic is just focused on the south region right now. Porto Alegre metropolitan area is having a huge outbreak. My girlfriend is a vet and has been dealing with new cases multiple times a week. Many of our friends also got it (it is very hard to not get scratched when handling with cats in pain). It is a really really shitty, painful and hard to treat disease, requiring multiple months of treatment. It is very painful but usually not letal for humans and cats that are in the earlier stages and get treatment. However it is absolutely lethal for populations of wild and stray cats, as it is very infectious and 100% lethal unassisted.
- mghackerlady 4mo ago>infect cats No! We must stop this at all costs >and people Eh, all right then. If it takes the cats out at least we'd be going with them
- trevithick 4mo agoThe article doesn't address treatment efficacy in humans. How is it treated? How effective is the treatment? Can this develop resistance to the treatment? The spread mechanisms and persistence are concerning, but without info on treatment I'm not sure how much I should freak out about this.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo agoCandida is already antifungal resistant in many cases, or so I remember reading.
- zelse 4mo agoWe have very few effective antifungals, and discovering new ones is an order of magnitude harder than discovering new antibiotics due to fungi being more closely related to animals (what's toxic to them is often toxic to us). Resistance is an ongoing problem and will worsen in time; Sporothrix already has strains that are resistant to mainline treatment. I recall reading that at least one developing fungal pathogen of concern is in practice impossible to clear from the body fully once established with existing antifungals. A further issue still is that some fungi exhibit extreme resistance to sterilization; one of the nosocomial emerging fungal pathogens of concern, for example, can easily survive the peroxide fogging technique often used to clean high-risk hospital rooms even at several times the standard exposure duration and concentrations. Additional issues include treatment compliance - clearing fungal infections can require taking the drug for months without missing a dose. We should be very concerned about emerging pathogens in light of anthropogenic climate change, but with proper funding and attention this is not necessarily apocalyptic.
- drdexebtjl 4mo agoHere’s the website (in Portuguese) from the Brazilian Ministry of Health: https://www.gov.br/saude/pt-br/assuntos/saude-de-a-a-z/e/esporotricose-humana https://www.gov.br/saude/pt-br/assuntos/saude-de-a-a-z/e/esp... It includes instructions for the general population and for medical professionals, as well as a couple of technical reports with tons of references to recent studies.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo agoWhy are we allowing immigrant cats into the country?
- senectus1 4mo agocan fungals go pandemic?
- happyopossum 4mo agoSo a disease that has killed 11,000 people in a country with a population of >200 million over 30 years is a ‘ginormous outbreak’? This kind of hyper-scary overreaction from the CDC official being quoted and other government agents is a big cause of the current loss of trust in those institutions. A few years ago monkeypox was gonna kill all of us and our dogs, I get “extreme heat” and “severe weather” warnings for days where the weather is 20* below the annual peak in my home town, and now a fungus is going to kill me and my cats. Ok boomer - just stop worrying please?
- drdexebtjl 4mo agoInfected 11,000, not killed. From what I can tell, deaths are in the dozens (over 30 years). I’m worried about the cats, though.
- aardvark92 4mo agoIf it had killed 11,000 people we’d be hearing much more about it. It made news that Ebola hit a record high of 1,000 cases this week.
- peterclary 4mo ago"We report the first three cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis outside South America, and the first ever cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis *in the United Kingdom*".
- moinism 4mo ago[flagged]
- edonhametsu 4mo agoWhat does this add to the conversation? It's hardly a summary, and not to be too judgy but seems like a third-grader's PowerPoint - just showing images that reflect exactly what it's telling me (both in audio and in text).
- tomhow 4mo agoPlease don't do this. It's against HN's guidelines and norms to engage in self-promotion or post content summaries or generated content. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- krunck 4mo ago"Who is at risk? Sporotrichosis affects otherwise healthy individuals, often those working in agriculture or with plants or plant materials, such as packing straw or thatching. It also affects individuals exposed to the fungus during leisure outdoor activities associated with skin abrasions. Contact with domestic or feral cats, particularly among veterinarians and others looking after cats, may also lead to infection in some regions." https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sporotrichosis https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sporotricho...
- r0yadar 4mo agoCan't I just go into a sauna to kill them ;)
- narrator 4mo agoThere was a Simpsons episode about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPrh-1Tu-gE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPrh-1Tu-gE
- mitchbob 4mo agohttps://archive.ph/K2RSo https://archive.ph/K2RSo