Why mucormycosis does not follow horizontal transmission?

 

Our medical fraternity in India at least partially has left COVID and have gripped their hold on mucormycosis.  Mucormycosis is talk of the town. 

Habit, habitat, genetics and finally the reproductive behaviour of fungi in general tells a lot about the poor disease causing ability of most fungi and the same we can understand in detail provided if we visit a little into the world of mycology by giving special importance to mucor. 

Fear-mongering and reporting of some sporadic incidences of mucormycosis need to be separated.  One might argue, why even may fight with the author, how mucormycosis can be called as sporadic incidence and close to 100 cases have been seen in India alone.  Still it is sporadic from the arithmetic of our total population or total number of COVID positive cases or total number of COVID patients got admitted into various treatment centres in India. 

Among several thousands of species of fungi, only four or five species of fungi are really considered truly pathogenic and a few that found to cause infection in man very rarely are referred as opportunistic pathogens.  Mucor is not even a designated opportunistic pathogen from the medical dictum.  Mucor is a well-known saprophyte (live by consuming decomposed, predominantly the plant materials).  

From the evolutionary biology perspective, procreation (reproduction) is extremely important for every life form on earth and the process can be very simple vegetative means (asexual reproduction) or can be mixing of hetrothalism or hetromorphism (male and female) called sexual reproduction. 

Synanthropophization would have started from burrowing mammals where a saprophyte has greater chance to learn, adapt and colonize on such host easily.  From early parasitism, the fungi would slowly developed synathropophization and then anthropophization.  Only a very few fungi have developed obligate parasitism in man or animals and most of such species have virtually lost their saprophytic ability, meaning cannot survive outside the human host and also partially or fully lost the asexual and sexual reproduction ability.  Best examples are the fungi that cause dandruff, dermatophytosis etc. 

Anthropophization does not come so easy for a fungus. The fungus has to pay heavy price for such adaptation and also such adaptation is not so easily reversible for the fungus.  Losing the saprophytic ability, asexual and sexual reproduction, and no scope for horizontal transmission (from infected people to others) and finally have to live and die within the same host are the huge prices the fungus has to pay for anthropophization.  

Mucor is an omnipresent saprophyte in our nature.  How easy and sensible it is for mucor to become human pathogen where the fungus has to pay heavy price virtually for nothing, but to kill the host? 

Saprophytism is quite obvious in mucor, mucor do cause infection in plants and plants are available in plenty for the fungus, mucor reproduce abundantly by asexual means (sporangiospores), mucor do improve its genetic vigour by adopting sexual reproduction where plus and minus strain cross and form zygospore and finally mucor is also eukaryote (bears true nucleus).  Why should such a fungus losses all the above advantages and become human pathogen and target COVID patients?

Is Mucor, Vishwamitra or Budha, who renounced everything and became sage and mucor renounces all the abundant gifts it has got through evolution and become pathogen because our medicos and media houses can discuss more about mucor? 

Some mycologists may argue that most of the opportunistic pathogenic fungi still retain the gene that is responsible for sexual reproduction but whether it is active or not is unclear.   The above findings only reiterates the possibility that fungi in general never wants to be pathogenic but such habitat selection might have occurred as an ‘accidental compulsive event’ and given a chance, the fungi might want to revert back to saprophytic mode of life.  But when man provides no such chance, it may be continuing parasitic mode of life in some rare situation to continue its life. 

Which microbe love to become a parasite where the chance of mortality rate of its host is about 50% and there is no scope for horizontal transmission as well?  

When a person is put inside an unhygienic chamber, meddle with his nostrils and mouth with medical devises, where the immunity of the person is so suppressed and also allow mucor to enter and explore, and then cry out to the world mucormycosis, how well our science should read such incidences? 

Our farmers, shepherds and villagers often sleep for hours near their agricultural produce and most of the time they may even sleep over their harvest. 

Should we believe that none of the agricultural produce has mucor and other fungi?  How many cases of mucormycosis our great medicos have treated in the past.  Should we believe that none our farmers and villagers suffer from diabetes mellitus and immune depletion? 

The reason is quite simple, when the fungus has an option to continue its life as saprophyte, it seldom infect human.  Further the air load of the spores of the fungus in all such situations will be too low to cause infection thanks to high ventilation.  It means the air load of spores of mucor in our COVID treatment centres has to be damn too high?  Whom should we blame for such negligence and horror, our treatment centres or Mucor? 

With the help of COVID, can well allow our medical system to burry its horrible sanitation negligence in COVID centre and make mucor, a villain?