Growing resistance to antifungal drugs threatens health, food security worldwide

People around the world are becoming more resistant to antifungal treatments, and according to researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Exeter, the end result could be increased outbreaks of disease and food shortages.

Improvements must be made to how existing drugs are used, coupled with the discovery of new treatments, to prevent these predictions, the scientists warn. Otherwise, people run the risk of a world with no effective means of controlling and fighting fungal infections, at a time when antibiotic resistance has also been rising.

“The threat of antimicrobial resistance is well established in bacteria, but has largely been neglected in fungi,” Matthew Fisher, a professor from the School of Public Health at Imperial and first author of the study, said. “The scale of the problem has been, until now, under-recognized and under-appreciated, but the threat to human health and the food chain are serious and immediate. Alongside drug discovery and new technology to tackle fungal pathogens, we urgently need better stewardship of existing antifungals to ensure they are used correctly and that they remain effective.”

Fungal infections include a number of different incarnations, but among them are blights which affect food crops and mould-related infections. Plant and animal treatments are in the most immediate danger, but human infection treatments are not far behind, and all because of overuse of existing antifungal chemicals. Already, crop-destroying fungi are believed to account for 20 percent of the world’s crop yield loss each year.

The researchers now estimate that the number of human deaths from fungal disease is even higher than those who have died from malaria and breast cancer. The findings, published in the journal Science, determined that more selective use of antifungals, the creation of new drugs, treatments designed to silence fungal genes or cultivation of more crop species could yet turn the tide.