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A hospital in Brazil.
A fungal outbreak.
Cancer patients and healthcare workers exposed.
This isn’t a hygiene failure. It’s climate change reaching places we assumed were sealed off from ecology.
Monica Piccinini on fungi, heat, and the myth of insulation.
The age of fungi by Monica Piccinini, 6th January 2026, Creative Commons 4.0, The Ecologist
Climate breakdown, fungal disease, and the Brazilian hospital on the frontline of a heating world.
Healthcare workers and patient companions on the oncology ward of Santa Rita de Cássia Hospital in Vitória, capital of Brazil’s Espírito Santo state, began reporting respiratory illness in October 2025: coughing, fever, fatigue, shortness of breath.
Treatments that usually worked failed, and recovery was slow or absent. As more people fell ill, it became clear the problem wasn’t individual, something was circulating through the hospital itself.
After weeks of investigation, state health authorities confirmed 33 cases of histoplasmosis, an infection caused by the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum. The organism, commonly found in soil enriched by bird and bat droppings, had entered a clinical environment assumed to be sealed from ecological exposure.
Ecosystems
This wasn’t a failure of hygiene alone. It was a sign of environmental change reaching places designed to keep it out. It was an organism older than humanity itself, one that’s learned to survive in a world we’re rapidly changing, overheating.
“This fungus is part of the environment,” said Tyago Hoffmann, Espírito Santo health secretary. “But environmental exposure can reach places we believe are controlled.”
The outbreak wasn’t an anomaly; it was a warning.
Fungi are essential to life on land. They decompose organic matter, cycle nutrients and sustain plant ecosystems. Without them, soils would fail and forests would collapse. Yet they remain among the least studies and least understood organism on Earth.
Scientists estimate there may be between 1.5 and 3.8 million fungal species and fewer than 10 per cent have been formally described. Even fewer are studied for their impact on human health.
Flourish
What’s shifting isn’t fungal behaviour, but the ecological conditions that once limited it. Climate change doesn’t create fungal disease from nothing. It reshapes the conditions in which fungi live, spread and persist.
Historically, this gap in knowledge hasn’t been particularly dangerous, as our bodies have been protected by heat. The average human temperature, around 37 degrees centigrade, creates a natural biological barrier, which most fungi simply couldn’t survive.
As global temperature rises, this barrier is weakening. Fungi are adapting, species once restricted to cooler environments are now evolving to tolerate higher heat. Some are now capable of surviving at temperatures closer to those of the human body.
“Fungal pathogens pose a serious threat to human health,” said Viv Goosens of the Wellcome Trust. “Climate change will make these risks worse.”
Warmer temperatures expand the geographic range of many species. For example, changes in rainfall change soil moisture, helping fungi flourish in places they once couldn’t. Floods carry spores across landscapes, and droughts dry out soil, allowing microscopic particles into buildings never designed to keep them out.
The outbreak wasn’t an anomaly; it was a warning.
Emergence
Fungi are exceptionally good survivors, as their spores are light, durable and capable of travelling long distances. In a destabilised climate, those survival traits become a public health risk.
Medical researchers increasingly recognise climate change as a driver of emerging fungal disease. A review published in Therapeutic Advances in Infectious Disease warns that warming temperatures and ecological disruption are redrawing the global map of disease.
We’ve already seen what this looks like with Candida auris. First identified in 2009, the multi-drug-resistant fungus has since been detected in hospitals in more than 50 countries across six continents.
Many researchers believe rising environmental temperatures may have helped it overcome the thermal barriers that once prevented fungi from infecting humans.
Dr Norman van Rhijn at the University of Manchester said: “We’ve already seen the emergence of the fungus Candida auris due to rising temperatures, but, until now, we had little information of how other fungi might respond to this change in the environment.
Vulnerable
“Fungi are relatively under researched compared to viruses and parasites, but these maps show that fungal pathogens will likely impact most areas of the world in the future.”
Histoplasma capsulatum has long been present across the Americas. Infection occurs when spores are inhaled, often after soil is disturbed by construction, wind or changes in ventilation.
In Vitória, investigators believe spores entered Santa Rita de Cássia Hospital through the air conditioning system or other structural vulnerabilities. Once inside, they encountered people least able to resist infection: immunocompromised cancer patients and overstretched healthcare workers.
Histoplasmosis often resembles flu or pneumonia, delaying diagnosis. In healthy individuals, it may resolve without treatment, but in vulnerable people, it can spread beyond the lungs and become fatal.
Resistance
Similar patterns are emerging elsewhere. Fungal diseases are appearing in new regions, linked to warming temperatures, ecological disruption and failing infrastructure.
Those most exposed are rarely those most responsible. Healthcare workers, cleaners, junior staff and patient companions are often the first affected and the last protected. Many live in hotter neighbourhoods, rely on underfunded public health systems and lack access to early diagnosis or paid leave.
The communities least responsible for fossil fuel emissions are being forced to breathe the consequences first. This is climate injustice, playing out at the microbial level.
Despite growing evidence of risk, fungal disease remains neglected. There are few antifungal drugs, rising resistance and limited surveillance. Research funding and political attention remains minimal, particularly when compared to viral threats affecting wealthier populations.
Insulated
The Santa Rita de Cássia Hospital outbreak isn’t just a medical story – it’s an ecological one. It shows how environmental disruption doesn’t stay outside hospital walls. It enters buildings through air systems, infrastructure weaknesses and assumptions of separation between human health and the natural world.
Climate change is often discussed in distant terms, such as melting ice caps, burning forests and rising seas, but its effects are already present in hospitals, workplaces and lungs.
Human health depends on stable ecosystems and when those systems destabilise, disease patterns change. The spores that circulated through a hospital in Brazil carried a message we can’t afford to ignore.
Climate change is reshaping disease, and the institutions designed to protect us are no longer insulated from the consequences.
This Author
Monica Piccinini is a regular contributor to The Ecologist and a freelance writer focused on environmental, health and human rights issues.
Superbug hits 27 states: Here’s where the deadly fungus is spreading by Alix Martichoux, Dec 30, 2025, The Hill
(NEXSTAR) – Hospitals, nursing homes and other medical facilities are struggling to gain ground on a drug-resistant and deadly fungus that has infected at least 7,000 people in 2025, according to tracking by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Candida auris, a fungus that was first reported in the U.S. in 2016, has spread rapidly over the past several years. It can survive on surfaces for long periods of time before spreading to patients through catheters, breathing tubes or IVs.
Some strains of the fungus are considered a superbug because they’re resistant to all types of medications usually used to treat fungal infections. While healthy people may be able to fight off the infection on their own, the fungus can be deadly in the health care settings where it spreads, where people are often sick and vulnerable. Fungus labeled ‘urgent threat’ by CDC is spreading rapidly, hospital study finds
“If you get infected with this pathogen that’s resistant to any treatment, there’s no treatment we can give you to help combat it. You’re all on your own,” Melissa Nolan, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina, told Nexstar.
The fungus’ drug resistance has made it especially hard to contain. More than half of states reported clinical cases of Candida auris in 2025, the CDC reported. With one week of data left in the year, the annual case count is approaching last year’s record-breaking figure of more than 7,500 cases.
See which states are reporting the most cases of Candida auris in the map below. Data was missing for two states: Alabama and Florida.
Some scientists theorize climate change is contributing to the spread of Candida auris and pathogens like it.
Historically, fungi have had a hard time surviving at our bodies’ warm body temperature, microbiologist Arturo Casadevall, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Associated Press. But as the climate warms, the fungi are adapting.
“We have tremendous protection against environmental fungi because of our temperature. However, if the world is getting warmer and the fungi begin to adapt to higher temperatures as well, some … are going to reach what I call the temperature barrier,” where they’ll be able to survive in the human body, Casadevall said.
Candida auris: Study reveals who is most vulnerable to deadly fungus infection
In the past, the CDC estimated that “based on information from a limited number of patients, 30–60% of people with C. auris infections have died. However, many of these people had other serious illnesses that also increased their risk of death.”
A study published in July, which looked at patients with Candida auris primarily in Nevada and Florida, found more than half of patients required admission to the intensive care unit and more than one-third needed mechanical ventilation. More than half of patients, whose average age was between 60 and 64, also needed a blood transfusion.
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