Three species of California trees were found hosting a fungus that worsens the condition of HIV/AIDS sufferers and causes other equally deadly infections of the lungs and brain.

The surprise discovery made by a 13-year old girl finally provides a clue on how nature can actively play a part in aggravating the battle against AIDS, which southern California and the rest of the world have been saddled with for decades.

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Elan Filler had spent the summer collecting more than a hundred fungi swabs from 30 trees and 58 soil samples around the Los Angeles area for her science project. A second step in her project was to isolate the Cryptococcuss Gattii fungus from her specimen.

The isolated fungi samples were then sent to the Duke University medical school for analysis with the help of her father, Scott Filler, himself a specialist in infectious diseases.

To their surprise, Duke University researchers found that the Cryptococcus Gatti fungus that Elan extracted from certain trees were genetically similar to the Cryptococcus they see in AIDS-infected patients.

Duke's post-doctoral fellow Deborah Springer identified the California trees that play host to the fungus as the American sweetgum, Pohutukawa and Canary Island pine.

All these tree species are abundant in southern California, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest.

Cryptococcus Gattii has been identified as the culprit in almost a third of deaths related to AIDS, and belongs to a family of fungi that can cause serious lung and brain infections such as basal meningitis, cerebral cryptococcomas and pulmonary cryptococcosis.

The recent finding, which was published in the PLOS Pathogens journal, prompted Springer to warn people that they may be at risk of contracting deadly infections when they come in contact with trees that host the fungus.

What is even more alarming, according to Springer, is that the fungus can grow even when separated from its tree-host, and can reproduce by dispersing its pores, thereby serving as a continuing source of deadly infectious diseases.

California has the highest number of HIV/AIDS cases among all states with 42,578 documented cases in 2012 alone, most of them from the southern part of the state. 

AIDS causes are mostly attributed to sexual interactions and other human activities that involve the transfer of bodily fluids from one infected person to another, and this is the first time scientists are looking into the possibility that the immune-deficiency disease may be aggravated by a fungus that thrives on trees.

The Cryptococcus Gattii fungus was first found in Washington State in 2007, had spread to Oregon in 2010, and was found to have sickened more than 200 people in British Columbia from 1999 through 2008.

TagsAIDS fungus, Cryptococcus Gattii