Click to read photo caption. In 1922, a team lead by Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. A few months later, one of the men died of a fever. When other members of the team also died, people blamed acurse.But some scientists, including microbiologist Bill Goldman, suspect that the real cause washistoplasmosis.Histoplasma capsulatum, a fungus, lives in the ground. In parts of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, where the soil is loaded with histoplasma, nearly 90 percent of residents test positive for having been infected — meaning that at some point they’ve breathed in thegerm.Bill Goldman knows all about it. “I grew up in St. Louis and on my chest x-ray it looks like I’ve had tuberculosis, but it was really histoplasmosis,” he says. It’s common for histoplasmosis to be mistaken for TB, a cold, or the flu. It can cause coughing, fatigue, and fever, just like lots of other respiratory diseases, so most people never even know that they’ve hadit.Histoplasma are a special...
