A Deadly Mold That Attacks the Brain Is on the Rise, and Scientists Aren’t Sure Why
A seldom seen but often deadly mold that attacks people’s brains seems to be causing more trouble as of late. Scientists at the University of Washington and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied lab-confirmed reports of the fungus Cladophialophora bantiana. There has been a noticeable increase in detected cases over the past decade, the researchers found, particularly since 2023.
- ▪A seldom seen but often deadly mold that attacks people’s brains seems to be causing more trouble as of late.
- ▪Scientists at the University of Washington and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied lab-confirmed reports of the fungus Cladophialophora bantiana.
- ▪There has been a noticeable increase in detected cases over the past decade, the researchers found, particularly since 2023.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/a-deadly-mold-that-attacks-the-brain-is-on-the-rise-and-scientists-arent-sure-why-2000822331 |
| Publication time | 2026-10-06T20:50:51+00:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-12T10:39:13.592Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-12T10:39:13.592Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NmPXePqTjMnn |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A seldom seen but often deadly mold that attacks people’s brains seems to be causing more trouble as of late. Scientists at the University of Washington and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied lab-confirmed reports of the fungus Cladophialophora bantiana. There has been a noticeable increase in detected cases over the past decade, the researchers found, particularly since 2023. Though these infections still appear to be rare, there is very little we clearly understand about the fungus, the researchers say, including how prevalent it truly is or even how it infects people in the first…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.