A Rare Disease Reminder to Wear Your Gardening Gloves

For amateur and avid gardeners alike, the arrival of spring often launches planting season: Time to toil in the soil!

Throughout all the digging, potting, pruning, watering, and harvesting to follow, it's always a good idea to don a trusty pair of gardening gloves. Why? Because the soil and certain plants can harbor unfriendly fungi. If they penetrate the skin through a small cut or a thorn prick, they can produce unsettling infections.

One of the most unfriendly of these fungi is Sporothrix, a genus that causes sporotrichosis, more commonly known as rose handler's disease. Sporothrix schenckii is the species most commonly found in the U.S., where it often makes its home on rose thorns and peat moss. Merely in contact with human skin, Sporothrix, is typically harmless. But if it pierces the skin or is inhaled in high amounts, it can wreak havoc.

This havoc doesn't involve a zombie-style transformation in the vein of The Last of Us, but it can get pretty nasty. Puncturing the skin's outer layer, the fungus sets up shop in the tissue beneath and transforms from its 'hairy' hyphal form to its unicellular yeast form. As a yeast, it reproduces inside its host, manifesting in disfiguring lesions that ooze puss and ulcerate. For people with healthy immune systems, the infection rarely gets past this form, and with the help of topical antifungals, is readily beaten back.