Having heard about rhinocerebral mucormycosis from another message board, I started looking it up, just out of morbid curiosity. I was startled to see that the fungi in question are extremely common, and that one source claimed most people breathe them in weekly, if not daily! (True?)
Heck, one of them is bread mold, for Pete’s sake! Of course, this comes with a caveat: the vast majority of people who get this have an immune deficiency, e.g. poorly controlled diabetes, steroids, and AIDS.
But that got me wondering: given the commonality of immune deficiency disorders all over the world (especially the ones mentioned above), and the commonality of the fungi in question, why is rhinocerebral mucormycosis so rare? Why aren’t more people’s faces and stomachs dissolving into black goo? Is that part of the immune system somehow more robust than others? Is such a thing even possible?
And something else that just occurred to me (this is my mystery writer brain speaking), and probably kind of absurd: could you deliberately spray someone with so many spores that it’d overcome their immune system’s capability to kill it all, making it literal biological warfare?
PS: The research also told me that one episode of House is full of crap; that girl should’ve needed major, disfiguring surgery and massive doses of meds, and there’s STILL a good chance she’d die. But then, maybe House is dismissive of such things once he figures it out…
The germ theory of disease is vastly over-preached and over-rated.
What keeps us from pathogens wreaking their destruction is our host defense. In a healthy host it’s a combination of normal flora outcompeting the pathogens along with our immune defense. In the immunocompromised, the flora all duke it out with each other but occasionally the pathogens win out over the normal (or benign) flora, and then they can more easily have their way with the host. We get bacteria in our bloodstream all the time just from pooping and brushing our teeth. In a normal host they get filtered out and killed most of the time by our immune systems.
This is why it’s so silly to worry about trying to constantly bathe yourself or sterilize your environment into better health. And stop brushing your teeth or straining at stool!
The pathogens which cause mucormycosis are pitiful combatants and only rarely get a nosehold, even when the native immune system is down for the count.
I don’t think a snootful would not hurt you but perhaps inhaling a giant quantity of spores deep into the lungs might–I’ve seen that with blastomycosis in a fairly normal host. A titchy bit of diabetes or something to help the process along would add to the probability of overwhelming a host with a fairly benign inhaled pathogen.
One more thing: in really poorly-defended hosts (say, no white cells at all), even normal flora (say, ordinary skin staph epiderdimidis) can become pathogens. Throw in a little hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) and you got yourself a host which cannot be defended from anything, including bread mold.
Having said that, there are cases of mucor for which the host was felt to be fairly normal. Either just a lucky break for the mucor species in that situation (sorta like a hole in one, I guess) or something about the immune system missed in that particular host.
Remember: pathogenic germs are everywhere. In meningococcal outbreaks, you might see better than a third of normal hosts hosting mening in their noses without any disease manifestations at all. Please tell this to my wife and her bleach spray.
I get a kick out of [del]Champgne[/del] the folks entering Costco, where I work. The regular routine is for the member to walk up, grab a shopping cart and come up to the stand where we offer Sani-wipes and Sanitizing Lotion (or whatever they’re really called.) The most common routine involves using a wipe to clean off the handle and such before they go into the warehouse, at which point they grab the handle and replace their own ubiquitous bacteria to replace the ones just lost.
The routine that makes me giggle on my lunch break, though, as I watch, is using the hand sanitizer alone and then grabbing the cart handle as if they’re now germ-bullet proof. That truly beats watching TV on your lunch break.
That works because they’re MY guys! My bacteria and I have a good relationship going on, and it’s okay to let them spread everywhere. But YOUR bacteria are the problem for me. My guys aren’t going to mess around with me too much as I’ve got the antibodies and the immunity to most of them, but who knows what YOU’ve got out there on your arms and who knows what else touching these things!
Maybe I’m missing something, but I didn’t think passing waste through the colon caused your bloodstream to pick up bacteria?
Also, I bathe daily - does that count as constantly? - because it feels good, keeps me from being stinky, and washes sweat et al off my skin before it can cause it to break out … not because I’m trying to sterilize myself.
You are correct to a point. Yes, it is silly to try to sterilize everything. All that does it make it so that the body has a harder time fighting off germs when it is exposed to them. At the same time, though, brushing your teeth regularly is a good habit to have, not because the germs will make you sick, but because the germs will eat away at your teeth and cause painful cavities. Washing one’s self every day is done more for exfoliating dead skin off the body and not necessarily for removing germs.
I assumed he meant people that stopped brushing their teeth because they’re worried about the germs. Surely our modern dental care has done something to cause our healthier teeth.
CP, probably due to my OCD, brushes several times daily.
I was simply making the point in an oblique way that, among the things which cause bacteria to enter our bloodstream are defecation and brushing our teeth.
“*Bacteria enter the blood stream by translocation from the contained source or by direct inoculation. Transient bacteremias, defined as bacteremia of short duration (15-30 minutes), occur daily, for example as a consequence of defecation or brushing one’s teeth. *” e.g. http://ocw.tufts.edu/Content/6/readings/207697
It’s our immune system that keeps us defended; it is impossible to avoid germs.
Interesting stuff here. Thanks for the responses so far.
Sounds like from my reading that’s pretty rare, though. Or else there was an unidentified factor.
So just how ubiquitous are the molds/fungi involved here? Would you have to be in a clean tent or Antarctica to not breathe them in, say, once every day or so? How far can they spread/linger in the air?
Something else I just realized: the fungi involved with the flesh-eating seem to be of specific types. Given what’s been said earlier about almost everything being a pathogen under the right circumstances, why don’t ALL fungi have the capacity to cause this? Why them, and not normal mushrooms, or that mold that grows on old starch?
And Chief Pedant, when you said they “rarely get a nosehold” under normal circumstances, does that mean they usually go into the lungs and throat, or they stay in the nose, but get killed?
