Three types of fungi that cause serious lung infections and were once thought to be confined to certain regions of the United States are now widespread.
In 1955, Histoplasma fungi grew mainly in Midwest soil and in parts of the East and South, and that’s where histoplasmosis infections mainly occurred. But Medicare records from 2007 through 2016 indicate that 47 states and Washington, D.C., had cases of histoplasmosis above a certain threshold, researchers report November 11 in Clinical Infectious Diseases .
In 1955, Histoplasma fungi caused lung infections mainly in the eastern half of the United States.
Medicare records from 2007 through 2016 show that the fungi have spread, causing infection rates above a certain threshold in 47 states and Washington, D.C.
These fungi are now “a lot more common than we think they are,” says Andrej Spec, an infectious diseases doctor and mycologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Doctors using maps from the 1950s and ’60s may fail to diagnose infections in patients who live outside of the fungi’s historical borders. Such missed or delayed diagnoses can have deadly consequences.
Spec and colleagues drew updated maps for Histoplasma cases and for two other fungi whose ranges have expanded, probably because of climate change.
Coccidioidomycosis cases, caused by Coccidioides fungi, have spread from their 1955 roots in the Southwest to 35 states, Medicare records indicate. Coccidioides includes fungi that cause valley fever ( SN: 11/29/21 ). Wildfires have been linked to a rise in valley fever cases in recent years ( SN: 4/13/21 ).
In 1955, cases of the lung infection coccidioidomycosis, caused by Coccidioides fungi, occurred mainly in the Southwest.
From 2007 through 2016, 35 states reported cases above a certain threshold, Medicare records indicate.
Like Histoplasma , Blastomyces was primarily found in the Midwest and East in 1955. But from 2007 through 2016, 40 states reported blastomycosis cases above a certain threshold, the researchers found.
In 1955, cases of the lung infection blastomycosis, caused by Blastomyces fungi, occurred mainly in the Midwest and East.
A new analysis of Medicare records reveals that from 2007 through 2016, 40 states reported blastomycosis cases above a certain threshold.
When diagnosing infections, doctors are taught to look for horses, not zebras, meaning tests typically focus on common infectious organisms, not rare ones, Spec says. “We’ve talked about these [fungi] as zebras … but they’re not zebras. They’re Clydesdales. Clydesdales aren’t the most common horse you’ll see, but they’re still horses.”
He hopes the updated maps encourage doctors to test for the fungi more often in patients with lung infections.
Tina Hesman Saey is the senior staff writer and reports on molecular biology. She has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in science journalism from Boston University.
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The U.S. Public Health Service deceived the men in the syphilis study at Tuskegee (several participants shown here) and withheld treatment from those with the disease. “The wounds that were inflicted upon us cannot be undone,” Herman Shaw said in 1997.
National Archives
“We were all hard-working men … and citizens of the United States.”
Born in Alabama in 1902, Herman Shaw was a farmer and a cotton mill worker. He and his wife, Fannie Mae, were married for 62 years and had two children and six grandchildren.
Shaw was also a survivor of a 40-year medical experiment.
From 1932 until the Associated Press broke the story in 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study of more than 600 Black men in Macon County, Ala., without their informed consent. The men were told they were being tested and receiving free therapies for “bad blood,” a local term for several ailments. Instead, it was a study of untreated syphilis. Roughly two-thirds of the men had the transmissible disease. The Public Health Service did not disclose to the men their diagnoses and withheld available treatments.
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The experiment tracked the damage the disease inflicted on the men. The endpoint was death.
In the 50 years since its end, the U.S. Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis at Tuskegee in Alabama has often been held up as a primary driver of distrust of the U.S. health care system in Black communities. Yet medical abuse of Black people has occurred throughout U.S. history.
White people have long justified abuse and mistreatment of Black people by describing them, explicitly and implicitly, as inferior. There have been “four hundred years of active decisions to dehumanize Black people and Black bodies,” says Rachel Hardeman, a reproductive health equity researcher at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis.
As John Heller, chief of the Division of Venereal Diseases at the U.S. Public Health Service from 1943 to 1948, did. Heller said in an interview with historian James Jones for his book on the syphilis study, “Bad Blood,” that “the men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.”
Half a century later, this racist experiment can look like a product of a long-gone era, even as it gets outsize credit for distrust today. In reality, the racism that fueled the syphilis study has existed for centuries and still permeates the U.S. health care system, causing racial disparities in access to medical care and measures of health. While there are a variety of efforts to address these disparities, including medical training to bring awareness of racial biases, there is far to go.
“It is never too late to work to restore faith and trust,” Herman Shaw said in 1997 when the United States apologized for the study. U.S. President Joe Biden echoed these words during a November 30 event acknowledging the 50th anniversary of the end of the study : “Restoring faith and trust is the work of our time.”
“A slave is not a human being in the eye of the law, and the slaveholder looks upon him just as what the law makes him; nothing more, and perhaps even something less.”
In his 1855 memoir, John Brown wrote about his enslavement in Georgia and his escape to England. He described being experimented on to test therapies for heat stroke . Brown was forced to sit in a fire-heated pit with only his head exposed.
“In about half an hour I fainted. I was then lifted out and revived, the doctor taking a note of the degree of heat when I left the pit,” Brown wrote. The experiments continued as the doctor investigated which medicine “enabled me to withstand the greatest degree of heat.”
The enslavement and abuse of Black Americans were sanctioned by prevailing medical theories. Antebellum doctors claimed that Black people “ possessed peculiar physiological and anatomical features that justified their enslavement ,” Vanessa Northington Gamble wrote in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1993. “This medical distinctiveness, [the physicians] argued, made Africans not only inferior but inherently suited for slavery.” And for medical experimentation.
That included excruciatingly painful gynecological surgeries performed on enslaved Black women by white doctors, experiments that advanced the field. Thought of as biologically inferior to white women, while also deemed to have a high tolerance for pain, enslaved women were considered “perfect medical subjects” for experimentation, Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, wrote in her 2017 book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology .
Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy were among about a dozen enslaved women who surgeon J. Marion Sims experimented on. He performed surgeries on the women, without anesthesia, to develop a repair for an abnormal opening between the bladder and the vagina. Held on Sims’ property from 1844 to 1849, the women were trained by Sims to assist with the procedure and became his surgical nurses, Cooper Owens wrote.
The work brought Sims renown as a gynecological surgeon. But, she wrote, “the central role that enslaved women played in these advances — by providing doctors the bodies and sometimes labor needed for experimentation, treatment, and repair — went unacknowledged.”
“The Alabama community offered an unparalleled opportunity for the study of the effect of untreated syphilis.”
In the early 20th century, white physicians attributed the high rates of syphilis among Black people to their supposed immorality and excessive sexual desire. White doctors alleged that the disease was difficult to treat in Black people, because they wouldn’t reliably seek out or follow a therapeutic regimen , Northington Gamble wrote in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine .
Another prevailing theory that motivated the experiment was “the belief that syphilis was a different disease in African Americans than it was in white people,” says Northington Gamble, a medical historian and physician at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “This whole theory of Black bodies being fundamentally different was a foundation not only of the syphilis study, but also the foundation of medical practice.”
For example, an equation that estimates kidney function long included a race-based adjustment, despite a lack of evidence for its use. The adjustment could mask the kidneys’ true condition in Black people.
Black people are nearly twice as likely as white people to have procedures during perinatal care and birth done without their consent , researchers reported in Birth in June. Hardeman has talked to Black people whose doctors sent their urine samples for toxicological screens in prenatal visits without their consent. “There’s this underlying assumption that there is likely drug use and that a tox screen is necessary,” she says.
The maternal mortality rate for Black women is about three times the rate for white women and for Hispanic women, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The latest data, from 2020, reports 55 deaths per 100,000 live births for Black women, compared with 19 per 100,000 for white women and 18 per 100,000 for Hispanic women.
Singling out the syphilis study when discussing African Americans’ attitudes towards the medical system is “overly simplistic and historically inaccurate,” Northington Gamble says. The view that “the medical profession did not always have the best interest of African Americans at heart predated the syphilis study.” And the burden shouldn’t be on African Americans to change their attitudes, she says. “Trust should be earned.”
Along with past examples, there are plenty of modern-day instances of medical racism that contribute to distrust , says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Every single day it’s still going on,” she says.
“What the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry.”
Twenty-five years after the end of the syphilis study, the U.S. government apologized. Northington Gamble was part of the committee that helped to make the apology happen . She spoke about the event during the November 30 remembrance of the syphilis study, hosted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
“When President Clinton said, ‘and I am sorry,’ … there were sobs around the room,” Northington Gamble said. “And it wasn’t sobs just about the syphilis study, but it was sobs about how Black people have been treated in this country.”
Addressing and dismantling the racism behind that unequal treatment “will require changing systems, laws, policies and practices ,” researchers wrote in Health Affairs in February. Those changes should include mandating standards for health care systems to achieve equitable results for patients, and medical training in the health effects of structural racism , knowledge that would be required for professional licensing, Hardeman and colleagues wrote in 2020.
Doriane Miller, a primary care physician at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and director of the institution’s Center for Community Health and Vitality, leads doctors in training on tours of the surrounding area, in the south side of Chicago. People often see the area as defined by poverty and violence, Miller says. The tour offers a different story.
Miller talks about “how people came to this city looking for opportunities from the Deep South, in order to escape racism and segregation, and formed thriving businesses and communities.” She takes the new doctors by Provident Hospital, founded by the Black surgeon Daniel Hale Williams in 1891. The first Black-owned and -operated hospital in the nation, it also provided training for Black doctors and nurses. Williams performed the first successful open-heart surgery in the United States in 1893 and helped establish the National Medical Association, the first national organization of medical professionals open to African Americans.
The historical tour is a way to give new doctors “a sense of, not just physical place, but the people they will be serving,” Miller says. People “want to have you understand their circumstances, so that you can respond to them as individuals,” she says, “rather than making presumptions about who they are and where they come from.”
Like the presumptions many made about the men included in the syphilis study. “What happens is that the humanity and the individuality and the life experiences and history of the men themselves, and their families, are erased,” Northington Gamble says. “People forget the fact that these were men with lives and families and stories.”
Aimee Cunningham is the biomedical writer. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
After mating, a male Philoponella prominens orb weaver spider (reddish brown) will use its front legs to catapult backward and escape becoming lunch for the female (dark brown).
From spiders that catapult their way to safety to sea sponges that sneeze themselves clean, here are the creature features that most impressed us in 2022.
Pics or it didn’t happen. In the first recorded instance of a fox fishing , a team from Spain filmed a red fox ( Vulpes vulpes ) catching 10 carp over a couple hours ( SN: 11/5/22, p. 4 ). This makes foxes only the second type of canid — wolves can do it too — that are known to fish for a feast.
Flying squirrels, yes, but a skydiving salamander? This bold amphibian, native to northwestern California, can jump and glide among the tops of towering redwood trees. By extending its front and hind legs like a skydiver, the wandering salamander ( Aneides vagrans ) can control and adjust its speed and direction while in the air ( SN: 6/18/22, p. 12 ).
In an interspecies battle for the ages, people in Sydney have had to up their defenses to stop cockatoos from rifling through outdoor trash bins ( SN: 10/8/22 & 10/22/22, p. 10 ). The birds have learned to push bricks off the bin covers using brute force, while sneakers jammed through a bin’s handles are a better deterrent. But these trash thieves may eventually find a way around that blockade too.
Philoponella prominens males perform a death-defying stunt to keep from being eaten by a mate after sex . The orb weaver uses hydraulic pressure within its leg joints to launch nearly 90 centimeters per second to safety ( SN Online: 4/25/22 ).
Teach a fish to drive a motorized fish tank and it will drive wherever it wants. Goldfish taught to drive showed they could navigate outside their natural environment and reach a target ( SN: 2/12/22, p. 4 ). Maybe one day these cruising fish will boldly go where no fish has gone before.
I am excited to share a new study led by Shachar Givon & @MatanSamina w/ Ohad Ben Shahar: Goldfish can learn to navigate a small robotic vehicle on land. We trained goldfish to drive a wheeled platform that reacts to the fish’s movement ( https://t.co/ZR59Hu9sib ). pic.twitter.com/J5BkuGlZ34
These creatures take self-care to the next level. Sponges are filter feeders, sucking up water through their pores to get nutrients. But when unwanted junk comes in, an Aplysina archeri tube sponge traps the particles in mucus, then expels it in one slow-motion sneeze ( SN: 9/10/22, p. 4 ). The Caribbean sponges are constantly oozing mucus like a child with a runny nose. Looks like someone could use a tissue.
Deborah Balthazar is the Fall 2022 science writing intern at Science News . She holds a B.A. in biology with minors in English and chemistry from Caldwell University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
While the stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope captured space fans’ attention this year, other telescopes and spacecraft were busy on Earth and around the solar system ( SN Online: 12/7/22 ). Here are some of the coolest space highlights that had nothing to do with JWST.
After several aborted attempts, NASA launched the Artemis I mission on November 16. That was a big step toward the goal of landing people on the moon as early as 2025 ( SN: 12/3/22, p. 14 ). No human has set foot there since 1972. Artemis I included a new rocket, the Space Launch System, which had previously suffered a series of hydrogen fuel leaks, and the new Orion spacecraft. No astronauts were aboard the test flight, but Orion carried a manikin in the commander’s seat and two manikin torsos to test radiation protection and life-support systems, plus a cargo hold full of small satellites that went off on their own missions. On December 11, the Orion capsule successfully returned to Earth , splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Mexico ( SN Online: 12/12/22 ).
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NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully nudged an asteroid into a new orbit this year. On September 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test slammed into asteroid Dimorphos, about 11 million kilometers from Earth at the time of impact. In October, NASA announced that the impact shortened Dimorphos’ roughly 12-hour orbit around its sibling asteroid, Didymos, by 32 minutes ( SN: 11/5/22, p. 14 ). Dimorphos posed no threat to Earth, but the test will help inform future missions to divert any asteroids on a potentially dangerous collision course with our home planet, researchers say.
The details of how those waves and others moved through the Red Planet gave researchers new intel on the structure of Mars’ crust, which is hard to study any other way. The data also suggest that some Marsquakes are caused by magma moving beneath the surface ( SN: 12/3/22, p. 12 ). The solar panels that power the lander are now covered in dust after four years on Mars, a death knell for the mission.
All five bases in DNA and RNA have been found in rocks that fell to Earth. Three of the nucleobases, which combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic material of all known life, had previously been found in meteorites. But the last two — cytosine and thymine — were reported from space rocks only this year ( SN: 6/4/22, p. 7 ). The find supports the idea that life’s precursors could have come to Earth from space, researchers say.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way became the second black hole to get its close-up. After releasing a picture of the behemoth at the heart of galaxy M87 in 2019, astronomers used data from the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of radio telescopes around the world, to assemble an image of Sagittarius A* ( SN: 6/4/22, p. 6 ). The image, released in May, shows a faint fuzzy shadow nestled in the glowing ring of the accretion disk. That may not sound impressive on its own, but the result provides new details about the turbulence roiling near our black hole’s edge.
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
California market squid ( Doryteuthis opalescens ), such as this hatchling, make tweaks in genetic material called RNA that may help the creatures quickly adjust to water temperature changes.
WASHINGTON — Squid don’t have thermostats to control ocean temperatures. Instead, the cephalopods tweak RNA to adjust to frigid waters, a study suggests.
Usually, genetic instructions encoded in DNA are faithfully copied into messenger RNA, or mRNA, and then into proteins. But squid and other soft-bodied cephalopods edit many of their mRNAs so that the resulting proteins contain some different building blocks than are inscribed in DNA ( SN: 3/25/20; SN: 4/6/17 ).
“In these animals, 60 percent or more of their proteins are actually recoded. This is astonishing in comparison to how [rarely RNA] editing is used in mammals,” molecular biologist Kavita Rangan said December 5 at Cell Bio 2022, the annual joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology and the European Molecular Biology Organization.
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Rangan, of the University of California, San Diego, examined the consequences that editing has on proteins called kinesins. Those molecular motors ferry cargo throughout cells along protein tracks called microtubules. Problems on the cellular railway can lead to cells’ disfunction or death and may contribute to disease ( SN: 12/12/19 ).
Squid hatchlings put in chilly 6° Celsius water for a day edited mRNAs for a kinesin protein differently and more heavily than hatchlings placed in warm 20° C water, Rangon found.
She then made an unedited version and several edited versions of kinesin in the laboratory and compared the proteins’ movements on microtubules. In the cold, unedited kinesin moved more slowly, traveled shorter distances and fell off microtubule tracks more often than it did when warm.
Two of the edited kinesins, like those made by squid in cold water, moved a little slower than the unedited protein. But the renovated versions grabbed on to microtubules more often and had longer runs than unedited kinesin. “This suggests that recoding can allow kinesin to stay on its tracks and travel farther” in the cold, Rangan said.
Changing some made-on-demand RNAs instead of permanently altering DNA may give squid more flexibility to adjust to fluctuating ocean temperatures, she said.
Tina Hesman Saey is the senior staff writer and reports on molecular biology. She has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in science journalism from Boston University.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
This human skeleton (shown from the waist down) from the island of Borneo bears evidence that the lower left leg was amputated roughly 31,000 years ago.
New scientific records are set every year, and 2022 was no exception. A bacterial behemoth, a shockingly speedy supercomputer and a close-by black hole are among the most notable superlatives of the year.
The first known surgical operation was a leg amputation ( SN: 10/8/22 & 10/22/22, p. 5 ). That’s the conclusion researchers came to after investigating the skeleton of a person who lived on the Indonesian island of Borneo about 31,000 years ago. Healed bone where the lower left leg had been removed suggests the individual survived for several years after the procedure. The discovery pushes surgery’s origin back by some 20,000 years.
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Bacteria normally dwell in the microscopic world. Not Thiomargarita magnifica . Averaging about a centimeter long, this newfound bacterium is visible to the naked eye ( SN: 7/16/22 & 7/30/22, p. 17 ). T. magnifica , which lives in the mangrove forests of the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles, is about 50 times larger than other species of big bacteria and about 5,000 times larger than typical bacteria. Why this species evolved into such a giant is unknown.
A supercomputer named Frontier crunched numbers with mind-blowing speed this year: 1.1 quintillion operations per second ( SN Online: 6/1/22 ). That makes the machine, run by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the first exascale computer — a computer that can perform at least 10 18 operations per second. The next fastest computer tops out at 442 quadrillion (that’s 10 15 ) operations per second. Exascale computing is expected to lead to breakthroughs in everything from climate science to health to particle physics.
Deep off the coast of Antarctica, icefish congregate in a breeding colony as big as Orlando, Fla. Some 60 million nests of Jonah’s icefish ( Neopagetopsis ionah ) stretch across at least 240 square kilometers of seafloor ( SN: 2/12/22, p. 12 ). Previously, nest-building species of fish were known to gather in only the hundreds. An abundant food supply and access to a zone of unusually warm water may explain the exceptionally large group.
By sifting through data released by the Gaia spacecraft, astrophysicists discovered a black hole that’s just over 1,560 light-years from Earth ( SN Online: 11/4/22 ). Dubbed Gaia BH1, it’s about twice as close as the previously nearest known black hole. But that record may not stand. About 100 million black holes are predicted to exist in the Milky Way. Since most are invisible, they’re hard to find. But when Gaia, which is precisely mapping a billion stars, releases its next batch of data in a few years, even closer black holes may turn up.
Erin Wayman is the magazine managing editor. She has a master’s degree in biological anthropology from the University of California, Davis and a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
