Against common medication resistant variants of the mushroom Aspergillus fumigatus are widespread in the environment and cause dangerous infections in humans. This is the result of a team led by Johanna Rhodes from Imperial College London using a genetic examination of 218 samples from the fungus from Great Britain and Ireland. As the working group in "Nature Microbiology" reports, 106 of the mushrooms examined were resistant to at least one of the usually administered medication from the Azole group. 26 of them were resistant to two or more active ingredients - 23 of them came from environmental samples.
Aspergillus fumigatus is a mold fungus that is widespread in the environment, almost every person inhales the spores daily. In addition, he causes most of the dangerous mold infections in humans. This infectious disease, called invasive aspergillosis, is a significant cause of death in people with a weakened immune system, for example, from cancer or from treatment with immune-suppressing drugs after organ transplantation. However, people outside these groups can also become infected with the fungus and become seriously ill, for example in connection with respiratory diseases such as COPD or an infection with influenza or coronaviruses.
Invasive aspergilloses kill around a quarter to a third of the infected even with medication treatment, almost all victims die without treatment. In addition, the proportion of resistant mushrooms for infected people has increased for years. "So far we have not been sure how the patients get such infections - whether [resistance] develops in the lungs during treatment, or whether the nestling spores were resistant from the outset," says Rhodes after a press release from the Imperial College London.
According to their findings, both ways occur. It has been known for years that the fungi can become resistant during treatment with drugs – but experts have long suspected that this is not the only source of such resistance. Rhodes' team found several samples from diseased people that were genetically so similar to fungi from environmental samples that infection in the environment is likely. According to the experts, both the genetic characteristics of resistant fungi and their wide distribution support the hypothesis that resistance is due to the use of fungicides in agriculture.
