We are likely to think of fungi, if we think of them at all, as minor nuisances: mold on cheese, mildew on shoes shoved to the back of the closet, mushrooms springing up in the garden after hard rains. We notice them, and then we scrape them off or dust them away, never perceiving that we are engaging with the fragile fringes of a web that knits the planet together.
Fungi constitute their own biological kingdom of about six million diverse species, ranging from common companions such as baking yeast to wild exotics. They differ from the other kingdoms in complex ways. Unlike animals, they have cell walls, not membranes; unlike plants, they cannot make their own food; unlike bacteria, they hold their DNA within a nucleus and pack cells with organelles—features that make them, at the cellular level, weirdly similar to us. Fungi break rocks, nourish plants, seed clouds, cloak our skin and pack our guts, a mostly hidden and unrecorded world living alongside us and within usThat mutual coexistence is now tipping out of balance.
Long-standing medical doctrine holds that we are protected from fungi not just by layered immune defenses but because we are mammals, with core temperatures higher than fungi prefer. The cooler outer surfaces of our bodies are at risk of minor assaults—think of athlete’s foot, yeast infections, ringworm—but in people with healthy immune systems, invasive infections have been rare.
But the balance gets hit and the opportunistic hyphae crawl and swell once the innate and acquired immunity barriers are weakened. Diabetes, steroid use and also virulence of the virus like Covid (suppression of patient’s immunity and low lymphocyte count) – these are ideal conditions for the Black Fungus. These fungi don’t really belong in people. Their ecological duty, as it were, is to degrade wood, plants and other dead bodies.
It usually lives in soil but can also be found in rotting food, such as fruit. Now rotting the live human flesh?
Dr Showkat Hussain shah consultant cardiologist Govt Medical college Anantnag and can be reached at shahmed25@gmail.com