McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:
An imbalance of fungi in the gut could contribute to excessive inflammation in people with severe COVID-19 or long COVID. A study found that individuals with severe disease had elevated levels of a fungus that can activate the immune system and induce long-lasting changes.
The work, published on 23 October in Nature Immunology1, raises the possibility that antifungal treatment could provide some relief to people who are critically ill with COVID-19.
“We know inflammation is driving severe disease,” says Martin Hönigl, a clinical mycology researcher at the Medical University of Graz in Austria, who was not involved in the study. This work, he says, provides a potential mechanism of disease-causing inflammation that might have been overlooked.
More here.