The hospital of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, a medical school in the town of Sevagram in the Indian state of Maharashtra, has bee

Why Deadly ‘Black Fungus’ Is Ravaging COVID Patients in India

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2021-05-31 13:00:07

The hospital of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, a medical school in the town of Sevagram in the Indian state of Maharashtra, has been taking in patients afflicted with COVID since May 2020. But in the middle of last month, something changed. Patients arrived with problems the physicians there had not yet seen in the pandemic: people were not only breathless and feverish yet had pain and pressure behind their cheekbones and around their eyes.

Their cases were some of the earliest indications of a wave of illness that is now swamping India, an epidemic within the pandemic: infections with a rare group of fungi called mucormycetes. The infection they cause, mucormycosis—“black fungus,” colloquially—can infest the sinuses and bones of the face and invade the brain or cause patients to lose an eye. When it goes untreated—and treatment is prolonged and difficult—mucormycosis can kill up to half of those who contract it.

There have been almost 12,000 cases of the infection in India in recent months, with most of them occurring in the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. “There was no fungus in the first wave” of COVID, says S. P. Kalantri, a professor of medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences and medical superintendent of its hospital. “The black fungus has painted the country red in the second wave.”