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Our Warming Planet Is a Petri Dish for New and Deadly Microbes | The New Yorker

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“Flesh-eating” bacteria is spreading. Infectious fungi are emerging. Microbiomes may never be the same. Are we ready?

Save this story Save this story On a sweltering morning last July, Vernon Spear, a burly eighty-five-year-old with thinning gray hair, went to check a chicken-wire crab trap that was hanging from a dock in Cambridge, Maryland. Spear is a lifelong resident of the Eastern Shore, near where the Choptank River flows into the Chesapeake Bay. He lives less than fifty yards from the dock. He was pleased to find that the trap held six feisty blue crabs, a local delicacy that he likes to steam and sprinkle with Old Bay. As Spear reached in, however, he scraped his arm on some metal, drawing blood. He w

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