AP: Rare tropical fungus infects hundreds, kills a few. That’s the news, what’s the story?
At the AP Mike Stobbe, keeping his eye on the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, got a good one this week. It could be better – probably not in one day, but this looks like feature material. The news is that for hte last five years or so public health authorities have been watching a new fungal infection emerge in the US. It’s new here, but familiar enough in tropical regions. Oddly, its locus is the Pacific Northwest of the US and in Canada’s British Columbia.
Stobbe filed from Atlanta where he is based. He writes it responsibly, playing up that this is not a raging epidemic but a still-rare and treatable illness. I’d like to think a good and curious medical writer is already making calls to the field teams, chiefly in Oregon and Washington, who are scrutinizing the outbreak. They are talking to docs and the people infected, and putting together clues to how this fungus, Cryptococcus gattii, took root in a place so far from its usual tropical and subtropical range, how it affects people who get it, and how much farther or more intensely it may spread. They surely have stories to tell.
Stobbe’s right to file on this from MMWR, but it’s not exactly new. Substantial regional and previous reporting is to be found. These include a Time Magazine “killer fungus” report in April by Alice Park that asks “should we be scared?” An ABC News report by Courtney Hutchison at about the same time declared fears are overblown. I find, at the Seattle Times, pickup of another somewhat reassuring story by the LA Times‘s Thomas H. Maugh II in early May.
Even these longer looks are essentially phone call stories – get a variety of opinions and write’em. A deeper feature visit with the medical sleuths seems sure to turn up something fascinating.
Grist for the Mill: CDC MMWR report ;
