Alien Invasion: The Fungus That Came to Canada - VICTORIA, B.C.

The Washington Post ^ | 4/7/07 | Doug Struck

[ricks_place]

The mystery emerged slowly, its clues maddeningly diverse.

Sally Lester, an animal pathologist at a British Columbia laboratory, slipped a slide under her microscope -- a tissue from a dog on Vancouver Island. Her lens focused on a tiny cell that looked like a boiled egg. It was late 1999. She had started seeing a lot of those.

On the eastern side of the island, several dead porpoises washed ashore early the next year. Scientist Craig Stephen, who runs a research center on the island, slit one open. He found its lungs seized by pneumonia and its other organs swollen by strange, flowerlike tumors.

At work at the family trucking firm in Victoria, on the southern tip of the island, Esther Young, a lively 45-year-old mother, was feeling lousy in the fall of 2001. She had headaches and night sweats and was tired, her family said.

The doctor told her she was pre-menopausal and it would pass.

All would become pieces of a medical mystery centered on a tropical disease apparently brought to North America by a warming climate. An alien fungus took root on Vancouver Island eight years ago and has since killed eight people and infected at least 163 others, as well as many animals.

Similar cases have been found elsewhere in British Columbia and in Washington state and Oregon. Scientists say the fungus may be thriving because of a string of unusually warm summers here. They say it is a sign of things to come.

"As climate change happens, new ecological niches will become available to organisms, and we will see this kind of thing happen again," said Karen Bartlett, a scientist at the University of British Columbia who played a central role in the search for the disease's cause.

[dusttoyou]

How about the X Files “Flukeman” episode? This V BC thing sounds close to it.

[AZLiberty]

The predicted drought in the Western U.S. -- also caused by global warming, of course -- will most likely reduce fungal infections there, so it all balances out.

This pseudoscience of blaming any change on global warming is nuts. But if it continues, we should make sure that good changes get equal time.

[AZLiberty]

The predicted drought in the Western U.S. -- also caused by global warming, of course -- will most likely reduce fungal infections there, so it all balances out.

This pseudoscience of blaming any change on global warming is nuts. But if it continues, we should make sure that good changes get equal time.

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl