Expansion Due to Changing Host Factors
In the literature, many fungi are attributed as “emerging,” which refers to a prevalence of the infection increasing significantly above the baseline. In most cases, this is triggered by opportunity.
Several immunologically naive patient populations have emerged. Host changes in human populations concern, for example, novel medical technologies allowing patients with low immunity, socioeconomic changes, and emerging immune and metabolic diseases. Transplant recipients, patients with chronic diabetes, and those with various long-term chemotherapy are such novelties. These are potentially infected by a gamut of infectious opportunists, such as members of Mucorales, non-albicans Candida, and various Aspergillus and Fusarium species. Most of these fungi—with the exception of Fusarium which simply seems to have been neglected (Al-Hatmi et al. 2016)—were already known as agents of disease since the nineteenth century, but their incidence has increased due to the expanding populations of susceptible hosts (Fig. 1.2a). Environmental pathogens respond to host changes in a similar way. As endemic or enzootic fungi with a narrowly defined environmental reservoir, their global frequency is low, and their increase, e.g., taking advantage of the AIDS pandemic in humans or FIV/FeLV infection in cats, remains moderate (Fig. 1.2b).1.4
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