According to someone I chatted to at a party (not normally the optimal way to identify top new cause areas!) fungi might be a worrying new source of pandemics because of climate change.
Apparently this is because thermal barriers prevented fungi from infecting humans, but because fungi are adapting to higher temperatures, they are now better able to overcome those barriers. This article has a bit more on this:
Purportedly, this is even more scary than a pathogen you can catch from people, because you can catch this from the soil.
I suspect that if this were, in fact, the case, I would have heard about it sooner. Interested to hear comments from people who know more about it than me, or have more capacity than me to read up about it a bit.
When people ask me “What is one area or issue you wish people paid more attention to in global health?”, I almost always say fungal diseases.
I co-authored some reports on fungal infections (e.g., this one), and my impression is that it is indeed very plausible and well-recognized by experts that fungal infections will rise in a major way as a result of climate change, though I have not seen any guesses / estimates of how large the additional burden could be.
I think the more important point is that, regardless of climate change, fungal diseases are a massive disease burden source already. Fungal disease-related deaths are plausibly on the order of ~2M/year, likely more, and it is possible that DALYs are in a similar ballpark as TB, malaria, and HIV (though again unclear, because fungal diseases aren’t even comprehensively included in IHME’s global burden of disease estimates yet).
It is also incredibly neglected, to an extent that I find almost unbelievable. Though this has recently improved a bit, with more attention / funding from the Wellcome Trust coming in.
I think one reason that people aren’t jumping on fungal diseases despite high importance and neglectedness is that tractability is tricky. Fungal disease treatments are often not very effective, expensive, difficult to administer, and have lots of side effects. Also, there are LOTS of different fungal diseases, that all affect different populations, manifest differently, and require different diagnostics/treatment. So there isn’t really an easy one-size-fits-all solution here.
I do not find it surprising that you haven’t heard about it. Lots of people I know haven’t, and there are several reasons for this that are too long to explain here (though this article might help).
Maybe helpful for you to know that Coefficient Giving have done internal research on fungal diseases (they also commissioned our work on this topic), so they might have more thoughts on this.
Hi Jenny, very interesting, thank you. What was the response of CG to your report, and do you know if they are planning to invest more resources towards this potential cause area?
I’m not able to comment on CG’s reaction to the report, as those discussions are confidential.
What I can say is that they are still exploring this area internally (given that they commissioned us to do more work related to fungal diseases recently (see here)).
I’m not aware of any specific grantmaking decisions or commitments at this stage.
Thanks this is super interesting and definitely concerning.
FWIW within the non-EA Global Health Community this has been a topic of conversation for the last 3-4 years. It is potential threat, but still seems like a super low percentage Xish-risk, because...
a) We haven’t actually seen anything terribly dangerous happen yet b) Antifungal medications are there, and if there was a super-dangerous-mass fungal threat I suspect we could make better ones pretty quicksmart. But yes this is far from guaranteed.
As a side note there are already plenty of pathogens we catch from the soil like anthrax and tetanus, as well as worms like hookworm!
The person I spoke to at the party said that he knew somebody who had a fungal infection and was likely to die from it.
I don’t know much about antifungals, but I infer from his comment that we don’t have enough antifungals to cover all of the potential fungal infections.
To my knowledge, there are a few (not actually that many) existing antifungals, but as I commented above, they mostly aren’t very good, and in several deadly fungal infections they are almost pointless.
Also, when a new fungal pathogen comes out, it might be harmless, or it might be big trouble, nobody can predict that. A good example I’ve seen mentioned a few times is Candida Auris (pretty serious and often deadly fungal infection) that emerged in 2009 independently in several regions of the world, pretty much out of nowhere. And the scary thing is that it was drug-resistant from the start! I think researchers aren’t quite sure why it emerged, but it could be related to climate change.
The idea of fungi evolving to infect humans and resulting in apocalypse underpins the premise of the famous game and TV series “The Last of Us”
Given the series’ critical acclaim and popularity, I wonder if it also demonstrates potential for engaging the public with this topic through mainstream popular media.
I was wondering if anyone was going to mention that. There was a lot of media buzz about whether the events of the show could really happen at the time of its airing. This piece by Yale is supposed to sound reassuring, but it just… doesn’t. :/
Among other things, the natural-atrocity take on zombies is what got me in love with the TV series; depressed by them but interested in this new aesthetic of dangerous nature globally killing human civilization, think overgrown moss on broken subways. I can indeed see things like it motivating EA people to prevent such things, very much involved with visions of such a world. 🪸
According to someone I chatted to at a party (not normally the optimal way to identify top new cause areas!) fungi might be a worrying new source of pandemics because of climate change.
Apparently this is because thermal barriers prevented fungi from infecting humans, but because fungi are adapting to higher temperatures, they are now better able to overcome those barriers. This article has a bit more on this:
https://theecologist.org/2026/jan/06/age-fungi
Purportedly, this is even more scary than a pathogen you can catch from people, because you can catch this from the soil.
I suspect that if this were, in fact, the case, I would have heard about it sooner. Interested to hear comments from people who know more about it than me, or have more capacity than me to read up about it a bit.
Hi Sanjay,
When people ask me “What is one area or issue you wish people paid more attention to in global health?”, I almost always say fungal diseases.
I co-authored some reports on fungal infections (e.g., this one), and my impression is that it is indeed very plausible and well-recognized by experts that fungal infections will rise in a major way as a result of climate change, though I have not seen any guesses / estimates of how large the additional burden could be.
I think the more important point is that, regardless of climate change, fungal diseases are a massive disease burden source already. Fungal disease-related deaths are plausibly on the order of ~2M/year, likely more, and it is possible that DALYs are in a similar ballpark as TB, malaria, and HIV (though again unclear, because fungal diseases aren’t even comprehensively included in IHME’s global burden of disease estimates yet).
It is also incredibly neglected, to an extent that I find almost unbelievable. Though this has recently improved a bit, with more attention / funding from the Wellcome Trust coming in.
I think one reason that people aren’t jumping on fungal diseases despite high importance and neglectedness is that tractability is tricky. Fungal disease treatments are often not very effective, expensive, difficult to administer, and have lots of side effects. Also, there are LOTS of different fungal diseases, that all affect different populations, manifest differently, and require different diagnostics/treatment. So there isn’t really an easy one-size-fits-all solution here.
I do not find it surprising that you haven’t heard about it. Lots of people I know haven’t, and there are several reasons for this that are too long to explain here (though this article might help).
Maybe helpful for you to know that Coefficient Giving have done internal research on fungal diseases (they also commissioned our work on this topic), so they might have more thoughts on this.
Hi Jenny, very interesting, thank you. What was the response of CG to your report, and do you know if they are planning to invest more resources towards this potential cause area?
I’m not able to comment on CG’s reaction to the report, as those discussions are confidential.
What I can say is that they are still exploring this area internally (given that they commissioned us to do more work related to fungal diseases recently (see here)).
I’m not aware of any specific grantmaking decisions or commitments at this stage.
Thanks this is super interesting and definitely concerning.
FWIW within the non-EA Global Health Community this has been a topic of conversation for the last 3-4 years. It is potential threat, but still seems like a super low percentage Xish-risk, because...
a) We haven’t actually seen anything terribly dangerous happen yet
b) Antifungal medications are there, and if there was a super-dangerous-mass fungal threat I suspect we could make better ones pretty quicksmart. But yes this is far from guaranteed.
As a side note there are already plenty of pathogens we catch from the soil like anthrax and tetanus, as well as worms like hookworm!
The person I spoke to at the party said that he knew somebody who had a fungal infection and was likely to die from it.
I don’t know much about antifungals, but I infer from his comment that we don’t have enough antifungals to cover all of the potential fungal infections.
To my knowledge, there are a few (not actually that many) existing antifungals, but as I commented above, they mostly aren’t very good, and in several deadly fungal infections they are almost pointless.
Also, when a new fungal pathogen comes out, it might be harmless, or it might be big trouble, nobody can predict that. A good example I’ve seen mentioned a few times is Candida Auris (pretty serious and often deadly fungal infection) that emerged in 2009 independently in several regions of the world, pretty much out of nowhere. And the scary thing is that it was drug-resistant from the start! I think researchers aren’t quite sure why it emerged, but it could be related to climate change.
The idea of fungi evolving to infect humans and resulting in apocalypse underpins the premise of the famous game and TV series “The Last of Us”
Given the series’ critical acclaim and popularity, I wonder if it also demonstrates potential for engaging the public with this topic through mainstream popular media.
I was wondering if anyone was going to mention that. There was a lot of media buzz about whether the events of the show could really happen at the time of its airing. This piece by Yale is supposed to sound reassuring, but it just… doesn’t. :/
Among other things, the natural-atrocity take on zombies is what got me in love with the TV series; depressed by them but interested in this new aesthetic of dangerous nature globally killing human civilization, think overgrown moss on broken subways. I can indeed see things like it motivating EA people to prevent such things, very much involved with visions of such a world. 🪸