Variants of the fungus that are resistant to common drugs Aspergillus fumigatus are common in the environment and cause dangerous infections in humans. This is the result of a team led by Johanna Rhodes from Imperial College London based on a genetic analysis of 218 samples of the fungus from Great Britain and Ireland. As the working group reports in Nature Microbiology, 106 of the fungi examined were resistant to at least one of the commonly administered drugs from the azole group. 26 of them were resistant to two or more active substances – 23 of them came from environmental samples.
Aspergillus fumigatus is a mold that is widespread in the environment, almost everyone breathes in the spores every day. It also causes most of the dangerous mold infections in humans. This infectious disease, known as invasive aspergillosis, is a major cause of death in people with weakened immune systems, for example from cancer or from treatment with immunosuppressive drugs after organ transplantation. However, people outside of these groups can also become infected with the fungus and become seriously ill, for example in connection with respiratory diseases such as COPD or an infection with influenza or corona viruses.
Invasive aspergillosis kills around a quarter to a third of those infected, even with drug treatment, and almost all victims die without treatment. In addition, the proportion of resistant fungi in infected people has been increasing for years. “Until now, we weren’t sure how patients get such infections – whether [die Resistenz] developed in the lungs during treatment, or whether the spores that implanted were resistant in the first place,” Rhodes said, according to a press release from Imperial College London.