https://www.inlander.com/culture/spokane-style-2518516
https://www.yahoo.com/news/most-critically-harmful-fungi-humans-110049282.html
Sat, May 11, 2024 at 4:00 AM PDT
In 2009, doctors at a hospital in Japan published a paper identifying a new species of fungus they'd found in the external ear canal of a 70-year-old patient.
Stargate (1994)
(from internet transcript)
Dr. Daniel Jackson, Egyptology archaeologist : And uh...to find a destination within any three dimensional space, you need six points to determine the exact location.
[Daniel draws a cube and places a dot in the center of each of the six "sides" of the cube and then draws lines between them all to intersect at a spot in the cube.]
US Air Force major-general WEST : You said you needed seven points.
DANIEL : Well, no, six for the destination. But to chart a course, you need a point of origin.
[He draws a point some distance from a cube and then a line to where all the cube spots intersect.]
Gary MYERS, Ph.D : Except there's only six symbols in the cartouche.
DANIEL : Well, the seventh actually isn't inside the cartouche, it's just below it, here designated by a little pyramid with two funny neat little guys and funny little line coming out of the top.
[He circles an upside down v that has a symbol above its apex and two human-like figures on each side of the "v" shape and then proceeds to draw it again roughly on the wall next to his chart while he talks. When finished, he laughs at his bad drawing. No one else laughs.]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1348-0421.2008.00083.x
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3681060353/?ref_=bo_rs_table_1
https://books.google.com/books?id=FcioAwAAQBAJ
America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry
Daniel Eagan
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, Nov 26, 2009
From 8/15/1951 ( ) To 10/28/1994 ( premiere USA film "Stargate" ) is 15780 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/15/2009 ( ) is 15780 days
From 9/24/1960 ( conclusion of the tv-series The Howdy Doody Show ) To 12/8/2003 ( premiere USA TV miniseries "Battlestar Galactica" ) is 15780 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/15/2009 ( ) is 15780 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_%2774
Expo '74
From Wikipedia
Expo '74, officially known as the International Exposition on the Environment, Spokane 1974, was a world's fair held May 4, 1974, to November 3, 1974 in Spokane, Washington in the northwest United States. It was the first environmentally themed world's fair and attended by roughly 5.6 million people. The heart of the fair park grounds was located on Canada Island, Havermale Island, and the adjacent south bank of the Spokane River, comprising present-day Riverfront Park, in the center of the city.
With the exception of two pavilions, all of the major buildings were modular structures assembled on the site. The fair had 5.6 million visitors and was considered a success, nearly breaking even, revitalizing the blighted urban core, and pumping an estimated $150 million into the local economy and surrounding region.
In proclaiming itself the first exposition on an environmental theme, Expo '74 distanced itself from the more techno-centric world's fairs of the 1960s. The environmental theme was promoted in several high-profile events
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/leaks-fuel-concern-about-spokane-train-depot/
The Seattle Times
Leaks fuel concern about Spokane train depot
Originally published March 8, 2005 at 12:00 am
A new refueling station perched atop Spokane's water supply has leaked several times, raising worries about aquifer contamination.
By Warren Cornwall
Six months ago, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway hosted a triumphant grand opening at its $42 million refueling station on the outskirts of Spokane.
The facility, across the state line in Idaho, was supposed to be a shining example of the newer, cleaner railroad.
Gone were the old days that left a legacy of contaminated groundwater and toxic soil across the country, including at least 14 cleanup sites in Washington, many in the Puget Sound area.
The new station featured layers of protections meant to catch spilled diesel, and for good reason. It’s perched atop an aquifer so pure that hundreds of thousands of residents get their drinking water from it without using a trace of chlorine to sterilize it.
Today, the fuel depot has turned from a point of pride to a black eye for BNSF, the largest railroad operator in Washington and Northern Idaho. The depot has sprung several leaks of oily wastewater, including one that contaminated the aquifer.
Officials say the plume of pollutants is not bad enough to shut down any local water supplies, but the threat to the aquifer has riled those who fought against construction of the depot, as well as local and state officials in Idaho and Washington. It also has sparked questions about how the protections would hold up in the event of a massive spill.
“We have this mentality, ‘Well, it is state of the art, it will never leak,’ ” said Rachael Paschal Osborn, a Spokane attorney who represented Friends of the Aquifer and the Sierra Club in unsuccessful efforts to block the depot. “Well, in fact, it is leaking.”
Railroad officials say they are working as quickly as possible to clean up the leaked fuel and figure out how several safeguards failed. Dump trucks hauled away 200 cubic yards of contaminated soil. Construction crews have torn up rail lines and carved away concrete to expose a plastic liner beneath that had leaked.
“We’re working aggressively to make sure the environment is protected,” said BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas.
An Idaho judge last week extended for one week an earlier order shutting down the depot while the problems are fixed. In the meantime, BNSF trains must refuel elsewhere.
Water for 400,000
One-hundred and fifty feet of dirt and rocks separate the railroad depot from the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer. It is a slow-moving underground river capped with boulders and gravel deposited by massive floods in the last ice age. Water wells poke into the aquifer like giant straws, siphoning out water for more than 400,000 people in the Spokane area and Northern Idaho.
The aquifer already is vulnerable to development. Stormwater laden with oil and fuel runs off of parking lots and streets, seeping into the ground until it’s diluted by the aquifer.
Battlestar Galactica - tv miniseries - 12/08/2003, 12/09/2003
(from internet transcript)
(Colonial One (passenger-starship) - Baltar is alone, with paperwork spread out before him)
Six: I see they've put you to work. (He looks over, sees her sitting next to him.) Ignoring me won't help.
Dr. Gaius Baltar: No, I've decided you're an expression of my, uh, subconscious mind playing itself out through my waking states.
Six: Oh, I'm only in your head?
Baltar: Exactly.
Six: Hmm. Have you considered the possibility that I could very well exist *only* in your head? Without being a hallucination? Maybe you see and hear me, because while you were sleeping, I implanted a chip in your brain that transmits my image right into your conscious mind.
Baltar: No, no, see that's me again. My subconscious self is expressing irrational fears, which I must choose to ignore.
Six: (moving closer to him) What are you working on?
Baltar: If you were really a chip in my head, I wouldn't have to tell you, now would I?
Six: Indulge me.
Baltar: I'm trying to figure out how you managed to pull this kind of an attack. You virtually shut down the entire defense network without firing a shot. Entire squadrons lost power just as they engaged the enemy. The CMP's a navigation program, but you, uh, you made changes to the programs that you were building in, backdoors for your company to exploit later.
Six: All true, in a sense.
Baltar: That was your job.
Six: Officially. Unofficially, I had other motives. We had something, Gaius. Something... special.
Baltar: This is insane.
Six: And what I want most of all is for you to love me.
Baltar: Love you?
Six: Of course, Gaius. Don't you understand? God is love. (She goes to kiss him. He jerks awake.)
Baltar: No!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
From Wikipedia
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, commonly known as zombie-ant fungus, is an insect-pathogenic fungus, discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and currently found predominantly in tropical forest ecosystems. O. unilateralis infects ants of the tribe Camponotini, with the full pathogenesis being characterized by alteration of the behavioral patterns of the infected ant. Infected hosts leave their canopy nests and foraging trails for the forest floor, an area with a temperature and humidity suitable for fungal growth; they then use their mandibles to attach themselves to a major vein on the underside of a leaf, where the host remains after its eventual death. The process, leading up to mortality, takes 4–10 days, and includes a reproductive stage where fruiting bodies grow from the ant's head, rupturing to release the fungus's spores. O. unilateralis is, in turn, also susceptible to fungal infection itself, an occurrence that can limit its impact on ant populations, which has otherwise been known to devastate ant colonies.
https://www.wired.com/2014/08/zombie-ant-fungus-in-the-us/
But back to why she was making ant-brain-fungus soup in the first place: de Bekker found that the fungus releases different chemicals depending on the species of ant. The hosts that it is capable of mind-controlling are inundated with entirely different compounds than those it isn’t capable of controlling. It's as if the fungus knows whether it's next to its target species or not, and then reacts accordingly, she says.
And that’s pretty damn impressive for an organism without a brain. Which raises the question: Could it be that Ophiocordyceps fungi regularly invade species they aren’t capable of mind-controlling? Probably not, said de Bekker, because they didn’t evolve one of the animal kingdom’s most insanely complex acts of zombification just to be jerks to ants. They need it to survive.
Here’s Ophiocordyceps’ life cycle in full: A fungus spore lands on the cuticle of an ant, fusing to its body and building up an incredible amount pressure (equal to that in the tire of a 747 jet) to blow itself through the exoskeleton. Infiltrating the ant’s brain, it directs the host out of the colony, where workers would surely notice their comrade’s weird behavior and drag it into a graveyard well away from home base. Directing the ant up onto the underside of a leaf at a specific height and always facing a specific direction, the fungus orders the ant to bite down on the vein. At this point it kills the ant and erupts as a stalk out of the back of its head, raining spores onto its comrades below.
The fungus goes through all of this trouble to best position itself to infect more ants and further its own species. Simply killing its host, like it did to the two other ant species in de Bekker’s lab, doesn’t get it anywhere, because ants are obsessive about dragging their dead and dying into their aforementioned graveyards, where the spores have little chance of spreading.
Interestingly, this North American species of Ophiocordyceps controls its victims a bit differently than its South American counterparts. “What is different about the temperate system is that these ants don't bite the leaves, they bite twigs,” said de Bekker. “Which is actually very interesting, because of course in a temperate system the trees lose their leaves over the winter, and sometimes dead ants have to overwinter into the next season for the fungus to completely grow out and make the spores and finish its life cycle.”
There is still much to be learned here, though. While in this experiment de Bekker isolated two different compounds---GBA and sphingosine in case you were interested---that seem to play a part in zombification (and perhaps tellingly also play a part in human neurological disorders), these are still just candidates. “What we do see is that there's a whole array of compounds that seem to be working together,” she said. “And this is probably also why it is so difficult to figure out what are the key compounds because it is likely that we need a mixture of different chemicals working in concert to get something as complex as this.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_in_the_Sun_(1951_film)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/most-critically-harmful-fungi-humans-110049282.html
Yahoo! News
'The most critically harmful fungi to humans': How the rise of C. auris was inevitable
Arturo Casadevall
Sat, May 11, 2024 at 4:00 AM PDT
Fifteen years ago, scientists discovered a new species of deadly, drug-resistant fungus: Candida auris. It is now considered one of the most dangerous fungal pathogens on Earth. In this excerpt from "What if Fungi Win?" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), author Arturo Casadevall looks at the rise of this deadly fungus, which could be the first to have emerged as a result of climate change.
In 2009, doctors at a hospital in Japan published a paper identifying a new species of fungus they'd found in the external ear canal of a 70-year-old patient. They called it Candida auris, with auris being the Latin word for ear.
At first, it wasn't clear how much anyone should worry about this new discovery, if at all. Many new fungal species are reported in patients each year, but the overwhelming majority of these turn out to be isolated case reports, nothing worth panicking about.
And C. auris laid low for a while, remaining an obscure unknown yeast in most parts of the planet — until it was found in hospitalized patients in all corners of the world, at roughly the same time. Strikingly, between 2012 and 2015, doctors in South Africa, Venezuela and on the Indian subcontinent simultaneously reported treating patients severely ill with what turned out to be C. auris infections (remember, no one had heard of this fungal species a few years earlier).
With no contact or commonalities between them, these C. auris cases had appeared independently on three different continents, with each fungus genetically distinct from the others.
This meant that the usual suspect for fungal spread — our globalized world — wasn't at play here. Something new was afoot. It quickly became clear that this fungus was remarkably resistant to treatment. More than one in three patients with invasive C. auris infections in their blood were dying. In hospitals where this invasive fungal disease had been nonexistent, it was now a significant cause of death.
To this day, C. auris remains mostly resistant to the antifungal treatments we have at our disposal, so once patients (and hospitals) become infected, it's nearly impossible to get rid of. Usually, doctors diagnose fungal infections after ruling out other sources, say, when a hospitalized patient has a fever that doesn't go away after treatment with antibiotics. Blood tests will likely indicate high white blood cell counts, another sign of an infection, but doctors often can't tell what type of microbe is doing the damage — or necessarily know how to treat it.
Related: Potentially deadly 'superbug' fungus is spreading faster in the US
Symptoms will vary depending on the fungal species. Cryptococcus neoformans usually involves the brain and causes terrible headaches. Aspergillus tend to attack the lungs, meaning the patients will be coughing, short of breath and reveal something pneumonia-like on a chest X-ray.
Disease-causing fungi can be breathed in or enter the bloodstream through cuts and wounds; infections can spread in the hospital through poorly maintained IV lines and catheters. Most often, the common symptoms are fever, malaise or just not feeling well. In the hospitals where C. auris was being identified, it was mainly spreading among immunocompromised patients — despite person-to-person transmissibility being a rare quality for an invasive fungus.
It could do this because, as doctors would learn, it can colonize human skin, last for weeks on surfaces and tolerate heavy-duty hospital disinfectants. Some hospitals have reported finding C. auris spores lingering in hospital rooms long after a patient was discharged or died, even after other fungal species have been eliminated by cleaning agents. C. auris didn't just stay overseas.
By 2016, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an alert to healthcare professionals and labs to be on the lookout for the new pathogen. By then, a total of seven cases of drug-resistant C. auris had already been reported in hospitalized patients in four states: New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Illinois. C. auris was hard to identify by traditional lab tests, so doctors were urged to report any suspicious microbes to the CDC.
Within a decade of it being identified, C. auris was killing people in 40 countries on six continents. We don't have exact numbers, as many cases go unreported or unrecognized, but the figure is certainly in the thousands. In the US alone, there were more than 2,000 infections in 27 states and the District of Columbia confirmed in 2022, and Mississippi reported its first cases (and deaths) of C. auris in early 2023.
Fifteen years after the fungus was discovered, the World Health Organization now considers C. auris one of the most critically harmful fungi to humans. The percentage increase in clinical cases of C. auris in the US has grown every year, from a 44% increase in 2019 to a "dramatic" 95% increase in 2021, according to a 2023 CDC study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Another disturbing trend: The number of C. auris infections that were determined to be resistant to antifungals in 2021 was about three times more than in each of the previous two years. As the authors note, "screening is not conducted uniformly across the United States, so the true burden of C. auris cases may be underestimated."
The march of drug-resistant C. auris clearly isn't slowing. If anything, it's rapidly speeding up. How did a fungus, so deadly to immunocompromised humans, just suddenly appear? And why was it killing people when it had never even made people sick before? Where did it come from? It is both mysterious and alarming.
After the discovery of C. auris, teams of researchers went back and explored old fungal samples. They determined that the fungus had likely been around since the late 1990s in some form, but they found no sign of C. auris prior to that and no evidence that it had ever killed anyone before.
C. auris, of course, didn't just show up on the Earth in the last 30 years out of nowhere. This ancient life form was certainly living in the environment long before that, shown by the fact that it had evolved into several different strains by the time it was identified. Yet it had been invisible to humans. Since C. auris hadn't been considered medically relevant until the 21st century, no one was looking for it.
There was no need. Until there was. "We know that new species don't just appear," Shawn Lockhart, a CDC researcher, told JAMA in 2022. "We just have not figured out where it was hiding before it started to appear in hospitals worldwide. There's a lot of speculation." Lockhart's best guess is that C. auris quietly coexisted with humans in the ear canal — until it turned up the volume. Body temperature may have long protected us from fungus, but we would quickly learn that C. auris was different. Unlike most of its fungal cousins, it can grow at temperatures as high as 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
This is what makes it so deadly to some humans with weakened immune systems. On some level, we haven't appreciated the protective role of temperature in fungal infections because most of the viral and bacterial diseases that currently plague animals and humans are typically acquired from other warm hosts — meaning they're already adapted to mammalian temperatures and can be transmitted with relative ease. For example, we catch the flu, COVID-19, tuberculosis and more from other humans (and perhaps other mammals), and those microbes are accustomed to replicating at our higher body temperatures.
RELATED STORIES
—Plastic-eating fungi could help take a bite out of Earth's rampant pollution crisis, study suggests
—Cause of mysterious brain-invading-fungus outbreak finally discovered
—'Few insect orders have been spared': Why death by parasite keeps life in the forest thriving
But things change when you focus on environmentally-acquired microbes, particularly fungi. While many fungi still can't survive at normal human temperatures, some can and do. C. auris is Exhibit A. In a 2010 paper, published in the journal mBio, microbiologist Mónica GarcÃa-Solache and I had predicted that a fungal threat like C. auris would be coming, though we didn't yet know its name.
"Global warming could have a significant effect on fungal populations," we wrote. "First, a warmer climate could change the distribution of heat-tolerant and susceptible species by favoring those that are more thermotolerant, and by creating conditions for more environmental fungi to spread and enter into closer contact with human populations. Second, under strong selective pressure, the prevalence of species adapted to heat tolerance may increase."
It wasn't a matter of if fungi would adapt to temperatures high enough that they could threaten humans, we warned, but when.
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 8:45 PM Pacific-time USA Sunday 05/12/2024
