Essential for Life, the WHO Compiles “Deadly Fungi” List
Updated
With the COVID-19 pandemic in the rearview mirror, the World Health Organization (WHO) has shifted focus to its next global crisis. In early April, the group published its “first-ever” reports to address what it calls “the critical lack of medicines and diagnostic tools for invasive fungal diseases,” noting that this deficit underscores “the urgent need for innovative research and development (R&D) to close these gaps.” Dr. Yukiko Nakatani, WHO Assistant Director-General for Antimicrobial Resistance ad interim, remarked:
“Invasive fungal infections threaten the lives of the most vulnerable, but countries lack the treatments needed to save lives. Not only is the pipeline of new antifungal drugs and diagnostics insufficient, there is a void in fungal testing in low- and middle-income countries, even in district hospitals. This diagnostic gap means the cause of people’s suffering remains unknown, making it difficult to get them the right treatments.”
But why such dire fear around fungi? In his book Entangled Life, author Merlin Sheldrake sets a fascinating stage for the mystical and enormously significant part that fungus plays in life on Earth. The first sentence in his book reads, “Fungi are everywhere, but they are easy to miss.” Indeed, fungi are within and around us, sustaining life itself. For over a billion years, fungi have transformed existence by, for example, consuming rock, creating soil, feeding and harming plants, breaking down toxins, thriving in space, producing foods and medicines, shaping animal behavior, altering the Earth’s atmosphere, and even sparking visions. Sheldrake notes that fungi hold the key to understanding our planet and “the ways we think, feel, and behave.” Remarkably, largely unseen but also the source of life, over 90 percent of fungal species remain unidentified.
Yet, apparently, out of the remaining 10 percent of known fungal species, the good ole WHO has honed in—with funding provided by the European Commission Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA)—and created a fungal priority pathogens list (FPPL) of “deadly” fungi “with mortality rates reaching as high as 88 percent.” According to the WHO, its report aims to provide an overview of the current research and development surrounding antifungal agents in preclinical trials and clinical development, evaluate them, and then foster the development of products for the most urgent unmet medical needs. Despite recent approvals and antifungal agents in the works, the WHO declares that the current clinical pipeline lacks the necessary innovation and targeting and fails to tackle the therapeutically challenging fungal pathogens it has identified as deadly and dangerous.
Stressing that infectious diseases, including drug-resistant bacterial infections, are a leading global health threat causing millions of deaths each year, the FPPL has categorized pathogens into critical (e.g., Candida auris, Aspergillus fumigatus, Cryptococcus neoformans), high (e.g., Histoplasma spp., Mucorales, Candida glabrata), and medium (e.g., Pneumocystis jirovecii, Coccidioides spp., Scedosporium spp.) priority categories. The WHO argues that invasive fungal diseases (IFDs) are a serious health threat, particularly for immuno-compromised populations, exacerbated by limited diagnostics, access to treatment, and growing antifungal resistance. Unlike drug-resistant bacterial infections, which cause millions of deaths yearly, the WHO reports that fungal infections are critically under-resourced, leaving their true burden and resistance patterns poorly understood.
To save the day, despite failing miserably at any meaningful contribution to the COVID-19 debacle and without funding from the United States, the WHO FPPL suggests three key action areas: (1) enhancing laboratory capacity and surveillance for fungal infections, (2) increasing sustainable investments in mycology research, antifungal drug development, and diagnostics, and (3) implementing public health interventions, such as integrating fungal diseases into medical and public health training and addressing antifungal resistance across a platform embracing a One Health approach. Under its deep-state connected guidance, the WHO urges countries to adopt a stepwise approach to improve diagnostics and surveillance, while regional and national contexts should guide implementation. The report states:
“This collaboration is crucial to strike a delicate equilibrium between safeguarding human health, ensuring food security, and protecting the environment.”
In addition to stoking new fear with its just-released FFPL, at the same time, the WHO also convened more than 15 countries and over 20 regional health agencies, emergency networks, and partners to test, for the first time, a new global coordination mechanism for health emergencies. Thankfully, without participation from the United States. In an April 4, 2025, news release titled “WHO brings countries together to test collective pandemic response,” the agency reports that its exercise simulated an outbreak of a fictional virus spreading across the globe. Oddly similar, let’s not forget Event 201, the tabletop exercise that was foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic, put together by the WHO, Bill Gates, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The latest two-day simulation, dubbed Exercise Polaris, tested WHO’s Global Health Emergency Corps (GHEC), a framework it states is devised to bolster countries’ emergency workforce, coordinate the deployment of surge teams and experts, and enhance collaboration between countries. No thank you WHO, been there, done that.
So let’s get back to fungi. Sure, some fungi might make us ill, but instead of being centered around profitable—and often harmful —new drugs and looming crises, wouldn’t it make more sense if the WHO’s global conversation was about encouraging healthy lifestyles, healthy, nutritious foods, and the importance of balancing the body’s microbes? After all, as pointed out by Sheldrake, your “body is a planet” for your community of microbes, which is called your ever-important microbiome. Indeed, the interaction between gut microbes and the brain, called the “microbiome-gut-brain axis,” is so important that it has given rise to a new field called neuromicrobiology. Instead of focusing on how fungi gone rogue might kill the less fortunate, let’s teach them that fungi are the basis of life and how to keep them healthy. Sheldrake wrote:
“Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been—and continue to be—a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of millions of years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than 90 percent of plants depend on these ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi. This ancient association gave rise to all recognisable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.
For your community of microbes—your ‘microbiome’—your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, and some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut, ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, and every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells. We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes, without which we could not grow and behave as we do. The forty-odd trillion microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us.”
