BLIGHT

A fascinating look at infectious fungi, “the most devastating disease agents on the planet.”

A former toxicologist and author of Unnatural Selection, Monosson begins her latest book with a discussion of Candida auris, a fungal pathogen that was first described in 2009, when it was isolated from the ear of a Japanese woman. Deadly and highly resistant to antifungal drugs, C. auris has recently been flagged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a serious global health threat. While it might be new to Homo sapiens, “over the past century,” writes the author, “fungal infections have caused catastrophic losses in other species.” The uptick could be the result of climate change. For mammals, the author explains, the primary line of defense against fungal infection is body temperature, which is too warm for most fungi to thrive. However, a warmer general environment may enable fungi to “evolve a higher temperature tolerance” and “jump the temperature barrier.” Monosson takes readers on a tour of devastation wrought by various fungal pathogens in other species. She follows a biologist who set out to study frogs in Costa Rica and inadvertently ended up documenting the “great frog die off,” the result of an amphibian chytrid fungus. The author then moves on to rusts, a group of pathogenic fungi similar to mushrooms that infect trees. Beginning in the early 1900s, a rust called chestnut blight obliterated between 3 billion and 4 billion American chestnuts in a few decades, pushing the species into functional extinction. One of the more distressing fungi is Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which has killed North American bats in droves; the author describes “caves that smelled like death” and “mice eating moribund bats that were too ill to fend them off.” Monosson is a skilled writer, capable of translating complicated scientific topics into compelling layperson’s terms, and she crafts a thrilling narrative around even the less charismatic victims of fungal pathogens (bananas, for example).

An engrossing read with an urgent message about the next frontier of disease.