^{Istock photo: Sebastien Windal}

A woman has a mysterious growth on her lung. A puppy suddenly suffers liver failure. These two mysteries have a common suspect: fungus. Both were the subjects of recent investigations undertaken by Jack Rogers and Lori Carris.

Doctors at the University of Washington Medical Center removed the growth from the woman’s lung. Suspecting a fungus, they sent a sample to Rogers to examine. He forwarded it to an Austrian medical mycologist, because he didn’t have the proper containment system to propagate it in Pullman. “We presumed it was something she breathed,” he says. After watching it progress through a life cycle and reproduce, Rogers discovered that what came from the lung was a fungus. Fortunately, the patient lived. She also presented a case that may be a first for modern medicine. “It was right on the edge of a genus of a fungi that occurs on wood,” he says. “But it looks like it is a warm-animal parasite.

Now Rogers is working on a paper about the find for the Clinical  Microbiology Newsletter.

Carris’s case was also rare, but not so rare that she hasn’t seen it before.

This time it came from Massachusetts, where a veterinarian who had graduated from WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine was confounded by a sick dog brought in to her practice. The owners had seen their bulldog puppy in the back yard eating something under an oak tree. Now the dog was very seriously ill, nearly comatose, and the veterinarian was scrambling to diagnose the problem. She contacted Patricia Talcott, a toxicologist at WSU. Suspecting a fungal culprit, Talcott turned to Carris, who, examining a sample of the mushroom, confirmed that it was a fungus common around oak trees, and deadly poisonous to animals. Though the couple lost their puppy, they had a new baby, and a new awareness of the mushrooms around their home.

“People don’t think bad mushrooms grow in their back yard,” says Talcott. “They were very lucky the identification was made.”

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