Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Stephanie Desmond

welcomes Johns Hopkins microbiologist and immunologist Dr. Arturo

Casa de Val back to the program.

This time, they talk about a so-called black fungus that is killing COVID patients in India at

a rapid clip and why fungal diseases in general can be more dangerous than many people understand.

Let's listen.

Arturo Casa de Val, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you, Stephanie, for having me.

So we've been hearing reports about this black fungus that is appearing in COVID patients in India.

So I wonder if we could sort of start from the beginning and tell us what this fungus is and what is happening. So the fungus is known as Mukor, and it's a class of fungi that includes

multiple species. One of the issues is that what's black is the lesion, not the fungus. The fungus, when it grows in tissue, it kills the tissue off. And whenever you have dead tissue, it gets darker. Think about a scab. Scab is dark.

So when this appears on the skin, the skin often becomes necrotic.

That's a medical term for dead skin.

And it just appears black.

So it is a black fungus in the sense that it causes black fungal lesions, but the fungus

...