The number of deaths due to fungal diseases was previously estimated at 1.5-2 million cases. A new study contributed by more than 300 experts from around the world shows that these figures are underestimated, but are actually twice as high. Adjusted statistics on fungal mortality rates, based on data from more than eight dozen countries, were presented by David Denning, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Manchester (Great Britain). His work was published in a magazine Lancet Infectious Diseases.

According to the professor, previous predictions are inaccurate because many fungal infections worsen other, often much more serious, diseases such as leukemia or HIV infection.

Denning analyzed scientific literature from 2010 to 2023 and combined this data with information from 85 articles on the scale of fungal diseases in individual countries and around the world. As a result, it turned out that about 3.8 million people die every year on the planet from such infections or those that accompany them. The number of cases of acute fungal diseases reaches 6.55 million.

The scientist found that approximately 68% of the total number of deaths due to fungal diseases, or 2.6 million cases, were directly caused by fungi. Another 32%, or 1.2 million deaths, are due to other pathologies that overlap with fungal infection.

More than 2.1 million people suffer from invasive aspergillosis caused by fungi every year. aspergillus against the background of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, intensive therapy, lung cancer and hematological malignancies. The death rate is approximately 1.8 million people (85.2%). The annual incidence of chronic pulmonary aspergillosis is estimated at 1.8 million cases and mortality at 340,000 (18.5%).

The author also estimates that 1.57 million people annually suffer from invasive candidiasis or fungal bloodstream infections. Applicant. They kill in 63.6% of cases (995,000 people per year).

Pneumocystis pneumonia affects another 505,000 people, of whom 214,000, or 42.4%, die. The morbidity and mortality rates of cryptococcal meningitis are estimated to be 194 and 147 thousand people (75.8%), respectively. Other dangerous fungal infections affect about 300,000 people, killing more than half (161,000), or 53.7%. Fungal asthma affects approximately 11.5 million people and may be the cause of 46,000 deaths per year (approximately 10% of asthma-related deaths).

The scientist warned that the new estimates are inevitably crude, given the wide variability in risk groups, significant regional and other differences in studies, inaccuracies in determining the mortality rate between undiagnosed and untreated patients, as well as the ratio of diagnosed and undiagnosed patients. illness. Additionally, flu epidemics were not taken into account in the study. COVID-19.

But new evidence has shown that fungi are far more deadly than other pathogens. For example, six times as many people die from malaria and almost three times as many from tuberculosis.