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# A Black Mold With a Taste for Brains Is Turning Up More Often
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/a-black-mold-with-a-taste-for-brains-is-turning-up-more-often/
- Published: 2026-11-02T11:03:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-02T11:02:59.000Z
- Description: Where this fungus waits, how it gets in and why one lab started catching it far more often are all still open questions.
- Author: Vitals
- Tags: Medicine & Health

A rare black mold called Cladophialophora bantiana has one favorite destination in the human body, and it is the brain. A single U.S. lab used to spot it a handful of times a year. In 2025, that lab found it 14 times.

The CDC report is a records review from the University of Washington's clinical reference laboratory, which tests tissue that labs around the country send in. From January 2009 through July 2026, the lab confirmed 48 cases and logged one more as probable. The samples came from 21 states plus Washington, D.C.

For most of that stretch, the lab saw between one and five cases a year. Then 2024 brought eight, and 2025 brought 14\. More samples alone don't seem to explain it. Measured against every sample from inside the skull that the lab screened for fungi, the detection rate climbed roughly fourfold between 2023 and 2025.

This is a serious fungus. Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of infections end in death, even with aggressive treatment, and about half of the people who get it had no condition weakening their immune system beforehand. Of the 49 cases, 43 turned up in brain tissue and six in the lungs. That lung detail backs the leading theory that people breathe the mold in.

Where they breathe it in from is still unclear. The mold has rarely been found in the environment, many patients don't share exposures and no national system tracks it. Why detections jumped is also unknown. The authors want more research into risk factors and into whether the fungus might be getting more aggressive.

Scientists still aren't sure where this mold lives. They do know which room it heads for once it gets inside.

**Read the full story at** [CDC, October 15, 2026](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/75/wr/mm7540e1.htm?s%5Fcid=mm7540e1%5Fw&ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Your DoorDash order gets more tracking than a fungus that heads for brains.