The tsunami may be the cause of a fungal outbreak in the Pacific Northwest

The Great Alaska Earthquake lasted four minutes and 38 seconds when it struck on March 27, 1964. And it wasn’t the outbreak that might have been called the seed for another 35 years.

In 2013, I wrote in Scientific American about a subtropical fungus called Cryptococcus gattii that unexpectedly appeared in 1999 in the lungs of hundreds of people, pets and porpoises in the Pacific Northwest. Although rare, it can be picked up from something as simple as a walk in the woods and prove fatal to healthy individuals.

One of the most surprising and puzzling twists in the story of C. gattii was that what appeared to be a single outbreak was in fact at least two, perhaps three. Two unrelated strains of C. gattii appeared around 1999 on Vancouver Island, while a third strain appeared six years later in Willamette Valley, Oregon. Today we know that all three are so different that they could be separate species. At the time, the experts were at a loss as to the origins of it all.

Numerous ideas have been brought up, including an introduction via wind, ocean, animals, eucalyptus trees, tires, boxes, or tennis shoes. Most scientists agreed that the fungi appeared to have made their way to the Pacific Northwest several decades ago, and that some subsequent disruptions – possibly climate change – triggered a wave of infections.

David Engelthaler and Arturo Casadevall, infectious pathologists at the Institute for Translational Genomics Research at Flagstaff and Johns Hopkins University (I interviewed Casadevall for my 2013 story), suggested a surprising hypothesis: that the fungi didn’t just take off on ships from South America to the Pacific Northwest , But then wandered into a tsunami to reach land. If so, why wouldn’t the infection strike mammals for another 35 years?

In describing their hypothesis in mBio last year, the pair pull together a circumstantial case. DNA analyzes of the three fungi indicate an explosion in evolution when they arrived in the Pacific Northwest about 70 to 90 years ago, indicating a common ancestry.

Engelthaler and Casadevall suggested that one candidate for this origin was the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. Empty cargo ships pump water into their hull as a stabilizer ballast. The water – and any mobile life – is often dumped at the next port. Cryptococcus species live in seawater, and C. gattii can live for at least a year. An explosion of shipping through the new channel may have resulted in C. gattii being transported repeatedly from a place like Brazil to waters off Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.

If so, the fungus still needs to be landed. They say the 1964 earthquake – which triggered huge tsunamis that killed people on remote southern California beaches – appears to have done the job.

Natural disasters are well-documented vectors. A wave of fungal lung infections followed Hurricane Joplin, Mo, 2011, as documented here. The 1994 Northridge earthquake in California triggered a small wave of valley fever, another fungal disease that is inhaled. People who have experienced tsunamis may suffer from invasive skin and lung infections, a condition called “lung tsunami”. Such a waterborne infection has occurred from ocean floods after both the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the Japanese tsunami in 2011. Even one of the survivors is a survivor. Tsunami of 2004 suffered from a skin infection of C. gattii.

But could a natural disaster trigger a pathogen emerging in a new location, leading to a new outbreak of disease decades later?

Much of the evidence points to this, the couple argue. The forests and soils most polluted by C. gattii in the Pacific Northwest are those most affected by the tsunami: low and close to the ocean. One exception – the area around Port Alberni on Vancouver Inner Island – however was severely affected by the tsunami. A wave of water dashed down a 26-foot-high entrance and washed away 55 homes. Today mushrooms are found in abundance there, although the city is relatively far from the coast.

The genetic data also reveals a second wave of evolution in the middle of the century followed by another period of stability. After decades at sea, the newly stranded fungi may have been forced to evolve rapidly to survive in a place not only significantly different from the ocean, but also from their original habitat. Wild amoebae – which are amorphous single-celled microbes – feed on C. gattii. Learning to excel over new North American predators may have taken decades. It may also have inadvertently trained fungi to evade the amoeba-like immune cells called macrophages that travel through our bodies and do the same thing. This learning period may explain the decades-long delay between the tsunami and its outbreak, Englthaler and Casadevall suggest.

The first known case of C. gattii occurred in the Pacific Northwest in 1971 in Seattle. Nothing else is known about the case, but the tsunami hypothesis will help explain this anomaly, since the fungus has already been on the shore for several years. Another sporadic infection may have occurred between 1971 and 1999 and simply went undetected, as Cryptococcus can become dormant in the hosts.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this hypothesis will help explain both the apparently unrelated C. gattii plants of the Pacific Northwest and their varied times of emergence. If several strains had settled in the ocean as a result of years of shipping, a tsunami would have washed them ashore all at once across hundreds of miles of coast. The corollary, of course, is that there are still more “surprises” waiting for us, and perhaps more effective in attacking mammals. They suggest that further environmental testing both in the Pacific Northwest and in nearby ports and lands unaffected by the tsunami could help support or disprove their hypothesis and would be relatively easy to do.

The mBio paper was published in October 2019, but has implications for later events. Engelthaler and Casadevall suggest that an outbreak of C. gattii in the Pacific Northwest may be a “black swan”: an unpredictable event with dire consequences. In fact, many or even most outbreaks may defy prediction.

Many scientists believe that the 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa was inevitable due to the circumstances, but the real reason was the opportunity to meet a group of sick migratory bats with children playing in a hollow tree. Nobody predicted that an influenza pandemic would begin in Mexico, but this happened in 2009. Likewise, the emergence of HIV, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS, Nipa and Hendra viruses and monkeypox virus in the United States was unexpected and unexpected. States; The sudden, severe antenatal effects of Zika virus and recent polio-like attacks in children suspected to be caused by previously benign enterovirus D68 were also unpredictable, as was the emergence of C. Gattii in the temperate zone. Our current predicament is possibly the biggest swan since the 1918 influenza pandemic, which may itself have originated unexpectedly in Kansas.

Huge amounts of money, computing power, and investigative resources have been thrown into the problem of predicting new disease outbreaks. These efforts have failed spectacularly this year. Financial philosopher Nassim Taleb, who coined the term black swan, says that an appropriate response to such events is not an attempt to predict them. To prepare for them. Although, in my view, it is useful to pinpoint their origins so that we can try to avoid future disasters (banning and severely prosecuting the sale of wildlife, and curbing deforestation appear to be clear and humane options), governments should only assume that epidemics and disease outbreaks matter Inevitable and take appropriate action.

It’s not as if we don’t have a precedent for expensive defense investments. In California, urban planners and engineers know gigantic earthquakes will strike, but they don’t worry too much about the details. After all, even after a century or so of studying seismology and geology at Golden State, the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake struck a fault that didn’t even appear on seismic maps. Instead, they simply build accordingly.

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