Fungal Infections and Climate Change: Emerging Threats, Future Directions, and Clinical Implications
摘要
Climate change is reshaping environmental conditions in ways that favor the emergence, adaptation, and spread of fungal pathogens, with disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations. Rising temperatures, altered humidity and precipitation, and more frequent extreme weather events collectively modify fungal ecology, host susceptibility, and exposure pathways. Heat acts as a potent selective pressure for thermotolerance, activating heat-shock networks, calcineurin and protein kinase A signaling, membrane remodeling, antioxidant defenses, and temperature-triggered morphologic switching. These adaptations enhance survival at mammalian temperatures, can increase virulence, and in some species accelerate mutagenesis and antifungal resistance. Shifts in atmospheric and soil moisture restructure plant- and soil-associated communities, influencing crop disease and mycotoxin production with downstream human health effects. Intensification of the hydrologic cycle and oscillations between wet and dry periods promote growth and aerosolization of soil-dwelling fungi, supporting documented range expansions and local emergence of endemic mycoses including Coccidioides species, Blastomyces species, and Histoplasma species. Extreme events, including dust storms, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, disturb reservoirs, mobilize spores over long distances, contaminate the built environment, and increase infections via inhalational and cutaneous routes, especially following trauma or near-drowning and when healthcare infrastructure is compromised. Additionally, extensive agricultural use of azole fungicides, which are structurally similar to medical triazoles, imposes sustained environmental selection that fosters azole resistance in Aspergillus fumigatus and selects for reduced susceptibility and virulence shifts in Candida species and Cryptococcus species. Interactions between temperature and fungicide exposure may synergistically accelerate the evolution of antifungal resistance. The emergence and global spread of thermotolerant, environmentally persistent species such as Candidozyma auris (formerly Candida auris) exemplify climate-linked pathogen adaptation. Clinically, broader differentials that include thermotolerant or geographically “unexpected” mycoses and environmentally driven resistance are increasingly necessary, yet timely diagnosis remains challenging, demonstrating the need for improved non-culture diagnostics, expanded surveillance, antifungal stewardship, and attention to social determinants that increase exposure and worsen outcomes. A coordinated One Health agenda, integrating sustainable agriculture, resistance monitoring, robust environmental and clinical surveillance, equitable access to diagnostics and antifungals, and development of novel therapeutics, vaccines, and host-directed strategies, is essential to mitigate the growing burden of fungal diseases in a warming world.