Valley fever

Naussicaa film poster

Lately, I seem to keep returning to the topic of fungal disease and parasitic fungi, far too often for my liking. This blog is supposed to be about the love for fungi, but, well - life is never simple.

So I came across this news item about "valley fever", a potentially fatal illness that is endemic in Southern US, as well as parts of Mexico and Argentina. It's caused by a parasitic fungus, and while about 2/3 of infected people suffer no symptoms, in some of them coccidioidomycosis, as it is known in medical science (try saying that after a few glasses of wine!), causes breathing difficulties due to fungal growth in the lungs, and sometimes even death, if the fungus spreads to the brain.

While reading the article, I kept thinking that I'd encountered this somewhere before. Not in the real world as it happens, but in Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 animated film, "Naussicaa of the Valley of the Wind". In the fictional world of the film, people have to wear masks to protect themselves from spores that rot their lungs. Interestingly, these spores are spread by a fungal forest that is feeding on pollution and ultimately cleaning it up - something that fungi have been demonstrated to be able to do.

In the film, people live on an "island", surrounded by fungal forest on all sides, and they have nowhere to go. So they stay and fight (and eventually, make peace) with giant mutated insects, fungi and their neighbours. But in real life, why don't they just leave?..