New fungal infection discovered in China poses threat to humans

A new fungal infection called Rhodosporidiobolus fluvialis The virus was recently discovered in two human patients in China, scientists revealed in June.

The infection was discovered in samples taken from two different hospitalized patients, according to a study published in the journal Nature Microbiology. R. fluvialis was resistant to a number of first-line antifungal drugs, such as fluconazole and caspofungin, at temperatures close to those of the human body, and developed into “hypervirulent mutants” in laboratory mice.

The researchers discovered the infectious substance while examining fungi from patient samples from 96 hospitals across China between 2009 and 2019. Of the 27,100 strains collected and analyzed by the team, R. fluuvialis was the only one that had never been identified in humans.

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“This is a remarkable and really unexpected finding, which bodes ill for the future,” David Denning, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Manchester (he was not involved in the study), told Science. But Matthew Fisher, professor of fungal diseases at Imperial College London, doesn’t seem to agree. “My first feeling is that there are unstudied environments in China where these yeasts live, and these two patients were unlucky enough to be exposed to them,” he told Science.

The fungal infection is thought to primarily affect people with weakened immune systems due to factors such as HIV or taking immunosuppressive drugs. The researchers did not provide any indication as to whether the infection contributed to the cause of death, but said only that both had been treated with antifungal drugs. (RELATED: Terrifying Study Suggests Fungal Disease Outbreaks Will Become More Common in Humans)

The two patients in the study had significant underlying health conditions and were hospitalized in intensive care units, but were unrelated. One was a 61-year-old man who died in Nanjing in 2013 and was immunocompromised. The other was an 85-year-old man from Tianjin who died at age 85 in 2016. The patient had diabetes, an immune system disorder.