Deadly Brain-Eater Spikes – CDC Alarm

Three trees shaped like human heads losing leaves — Photo: Lightspring / Shutterstock

A fungus that eats into the brain and kills up to seven out of ten people it infects is showing up far more often across the United States.

Quick Take

A CDC report found detections of the fungus Cladophialophora bantiana jumped from single digits a year to 14 cases in 2025.
The fungus mainly attacks the central nervous system and carries a 60 to 70 percent death rate.
Nearly nine in ten cases involved brain or spinal tissue, found in patients across 22 states and Washington, D.C.
No national tracking system exists for this fungus, so health officials rely on one specialized lab’s data.

A Rare Brain Fungus Is Showing Up More Often

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published an early report this month on a fungus most Americans have never heard of. Cladophialophora bantiana lives in soil and rotting plants worldwide. It rarely infects people. When it does, it often heads straight for the brain, causing abscesses that are hard to treat and often fatal.

Researchers at the University of Washington reviewed samples sent to one clinical lab between January 2009 and July 2026. They found 48 confirmed cases and one probable case total. That count held steady at one to five cases a year for over a decade, then climbed to eight in 2024 and 14 in 2025, a roughly fourfold jump in just two years.

What the Numbers From One Lab Reveal

Cases turned up in 21 states and the District of Columbia, with the heaviest concentrations in California, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Eighty-eight percent of infected samples came from brain or spinal cord tissue, confirming the fungus mostly targets the nervous system. Researchers also found it in lung samples, which supports the idea that people breathe in fungal spores before the infection spreads inward.

The fatality rate sits between 60 and 70 percent once the fungus reaches the brain, according to the CDC report. That makes this one of the deadliest fungal threats tracked in recent years, even though total case numbers remain small compared to common infections. Scientists studying the pattern admit they still cannot fully explain why detections accelerated so sharply starting around 2023.

Why Doctors Still Don’t Know the Full Picture

No formal national surveillance system exists for this fungus. Unlike reportable diseases that states must track by law, Cladophialophora bantiana detections depend on doctors suspecting an unusual infection and sending samples to a lab equipped to identify it. The CDC itself has acknowledged that fungal disease data generally suffers from underdiagnosis and underreporting, since many sick people never get tested or never seek care at all.

🚨 BREAKING: Cases of a rare brain-infecting fungus are reportedly rising in the U.S. Cladophialophora bantiana can cause deadly brain infections, with a reported mortality rate of up to 70%.

— SARS‑CoV‑2 (COVID-19) (@COVID19_disease) October 15, 2026

That gap matters for how Americans should read this news. A fourfold rise in detections from one laboratory is a real and useful warning sign, not proof of a nationwide outbreak sweeping the country. Globally, fewer than 200 cerebral cases have ever been documented across 26 countries, with the United States accounting for about a quarter of them. The honest takeaway is that doctors need to watch for this fungus more closely, and health agencies need better tools to count it, before anyone can say with confidence how fast it is truly spreading.