[graffis-l] the deadly fungus that came to Canada

[Guest guest]

At 12:13 PM 4/9/07, you wrote:

>Alien Invasion: The Fungus That Came to Canada

>

>By Doug Struck

>Washington Post Foreign Service

>Sunday, April 8, 2007; D01

>

>VICTORIA, B.C. -- The mystery emerged slowly, its clues maddeningly diverse.

>Sally Lester, an animal pathologist at a British Columbia laboratory,

>slipped a slide under her microscope -- a tissue from a dog on Vancouver

>Island. Her lens focused on a tiny cell that looked like a boiled egg. It

>was late 1999. She had started seeing a lot of those.

>On the eastern side of the island, several dead porpoises washed ashore

>early the next year. Scientist Craig Stephen, who runs a research center on

>the island, slit one open. He found its lungs seized by pneumonia and its

>other organs swollen by strange, flowerlike tumors.

>At work at the family trucking firm in Victoria, on the southern tip of the

>island, Esther Young, a lively 45-year-old mother, was feeling lousy in the

>fall of 2001. She had headaches and night sweats and was tired, her family

>said.

>The doctor told her she was pre-menopausal and it would pass.

>All would become pieces of a medical mystery centered on a tropical disease

>apparently brought to North America by a warming climate. An alien fungus

>took root on Vancouver Island eight years ago and has since killed eight

>people and infected at least 163 others, as well as many animals.

>Similar cases have been found elsewhere in British Columbia and in

>Washington state and Oregon. Scientists say the fungus may be thriving

>because of a string of unusually warm summers here. They say it is a sign of

>things to come.

> " As climate change happens, new ecological niches will become available to

>organisms, and we will see this kind of thing happen again, " said Karen

>Bartlett, a scientist at the University of British Columbia who played a

>central role in the search for the disease's cause.

>Her investigation eventually would focus on a fungus, a member of the yeast

>family called Cryptococcus gattii. The microscopic fungus is normally found

>in the bark of eucalyptus trees in Australia and other tropical zones.

>Physicians in North America are familiar with a relative, Cryptococcus

>neoformans. In humans, it shows up through pneumonia when immune systems

>already are weak, most typically in AIDS patients. In dogs and cats, it can

>form abscesses below the eyes. Lester, working in her pathology lab in 1999,

>was used to seeing tissue specimens from six to 10 pets a year with it.

>But by 2000, vets on the island were sending her 10 positive samples a

>month. Lester knew Cryptococcus causes a disease that, like bird flu and

>West Nile virus, affects animals and humans. She put in a call to the

>British Columbia Center for Disease Control.

>The call came at a busy time for Murray Fyfe. The head epidemiologist at the

>provincial CDC was then dealing with a bevy of other public health problems:

>Peanuts from China had caused salmonella. Some local spinach was tainted.

>And there was a surge of men coming to hospitals with diarrhea.

>Fyfe consulted Pamela Kibsey, a microbiologist at the Vancouver Island

>Health Authority. Kibsey said she had noticed an increase in human cases of

>Cryptococcus. And there was something strange about it. It was infecting

>healthy people, not just the sick.

>Fyfe formed a group to begin combing records of veterinarians and hospitals,

>tracing the first cases back to 1999. He asked Bartlett, at UBC, to join the

>group. They sent samples of the Cryptococcus recovered from diseased tissue

>for further analysis. The results showed it wasn't the familiar form of

> " crypto. "

> " This was an Australian fungus, " Stephen said. " We said, 'What's a nice girl

>like you doing in a place like this?' "

>More disturbing, the fungus appeared to be more virulent than in Australia.

>There, it infects about four people per million and is rarely fatal. On

>Vancouver Island, the rate was 27 per million, and it was more often killing

>people.

>The scientists can only guess how, or when, the fungus arrived. It could

>have been brought on eucalyptus trees imported by nurseries from Australia.

>Or it may always have been on the island, quietly clinging to life unnoticed

>until the warm summers spurred it to proliferate.

> " With global warming, it may have finally been able to emerge to a level [at

>which] it is infectious, " Fyfe said. Humans and animals living in the area,

>having had no exposure, had developed no immunities to it. Some people

>reacted to exposure by developing the disease.

>Bartlett formed a team of students to try to find gattii in the wild. Armed

>with new detection kits ordered from Japan, they tramped through back yards

>on Vancouver Island, digging up soil, taking air samples, swabbing bark on

>trees. They went out with hour-long questionnaires to talk to survivors of

>the disease and to owners of infected pets.

>One common site came up: Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park. It is an expanse

>of moss-covered fir and hemlock trees that reach for the sky, cheered by

>ravens and gulls, next to the Strait of Georgia. Patient Esther Young had

>gone to the park to kayak. Several other patients had been there.

>Fyfe helped the students swab an old Douglas fir at the park. Two weeks

>later, Bartlett called him, excited. The swabs had come back positive, the

>first discovery of Cryptococcus gattii in the wild.

>With the summer of 2002 approaching, Fyfe had a problem. The park had a

>popular campground; families reserved a year ahead for tent spots. Fyfe knew

>most people could come into contact with gattii with no ill effects. Those

>few who did become infected could be treated successfully.

>So he decided on a low-key information campaign. He posted pamphlets in the

>park and sent out notices to vacationers who had made Internet reservations.

>The reaction was prompt: The park got 750 cancellations.

>Word was also getting out through the news media. Ken James heard it on TV.

>At 55, the former millworker in the island town of Duncan had been plagued

>by a tickle in his chest, a nagging cough, night sweats and an intense

>desire every day to take a nap. When he heard the report on " this weird

>fungal disease, " he said, it ticked off the same symptoms.

>His doctor was skeptical, but a chest X-ray showed nodules in his lung --

>either cancer or the fungus. To James's relief, it was gattii, and after a

>year of oral medication, he is cured.

> " Did I walk past a tree when the fungus was exploding? Who knows, " he said.

> " If I hadn't seen that news report, things could have been very different

>for me. "

>By the start of 2003, Bartlett's students had found the fungus in other

>spots. They eventually concluded that it had infested a several-hundred-mile

>range on eastern Vancouver Island. Health authorities agreed with business

>leaders in the adjacent city of Parksville that it was no longer fair to

>target the park alone, and warning signs at the Rathtrevor Beach park came

>down in favor of a wider information campaign.

>Health authorities still are struggling to strike the right balance with the

>public. " It's serious, but it's still a very rare disease. Much rarer than

>influenza, for example, " said Eleni Galanis, epidemiologist at the B.C.

>Center for Disease Control. " People need to be aware of it, in order to

>treat it. But we don't want people to stop going outside. "

>If doctors catch the disease early, oral doses of antifungal drugs will kill

>the cells. Undetected, the fungus can get into the spinal fluid, causing

>potentially fatal meningitis.

>Young went home sick in February 2002. By that summer, she could not walk,

>had lost her ability to speak, had gone temporarily blind and was slowly

>starving because she could not keep food down. By the time doctors tested

>her, the fungus had reached her brain.

> " My poor sister couldn't even tell anyone how she was feeling, " said Deborah

>Chow, 51, reminiscing with her family. Finally, with Young's pain clear and

>the end inevitable, Chow held her sister in the hospital and whispered,

> " It's okay to go. Dad will be okay. Your son will be okay. " She died 45

>minutes later.

>New cases on Vancouver Island have leveled off at about 25 a year. Eight

>people have died. Bartlett's focus now is to figure out whether -- and

>how -- the fungus is moving.

>Five human cases have been found on the British Columbia mainland; two

>people have been sickened in Washington state; and Oregon has had two

>fatalities from a similar but not identical strain of gattii. Health

>authorities in Washington and Oregon say the disease is still too rare in

>their areas to warrant alarm, but they are watching it. Bartlett said it is

>unclear whether the fungus has been tracked elsewhere on the bottom of shoes

>or in wheel wells.

> " One possibility for what we are seeing on the mainland is the first

>colonization, like we had on the island in 1999, " Bartlett said. Another is

>that those traces will disappear.

>The infected porpoises -- at least 25 of them now -- suggest the fungus is

>carried by air over the water. Stephen Raverty, a pathologist at the

>provincial veterinary center in British Columbia, worries that the fungus

>can attack other species.

>Killer whales, whose numbers have dropped sharply here, are cetaceans like

>the stricken Dall's porpoises. Raverty and others have been tracking the

>killer whales in Puget Sound, using glassine slides mounted on long poles to

>catch droplets from the whales' exhalations, to see whether the animals have

>been infected.

>So far, they haven't found the fungus. But animals can act as a sentinel for

>humans, the scientists say.

> " These are the types of things we will see with climate change, " Fyfe said.

> " As the weather in North America gets warmer, we are more likely to be

>affected by these public health threats. "

 

******

Kraig and Shirley Carroll ... in the woods of SE Kentucky

http://www.thehavens.com/

thehavens

606-376-3363

 

 

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