Science Fiction Fungal Disease - Spore Germination Through Coughing

So I'm working on this new novel with a fungal-like disease that is alien in nature and I have a question pertaining to spore germination.

Some background - the disease is fungal-like, but not necessarily grounded to what we have seen before. It arrives on Earth on the back of a meteorite, and it just behaves similar enough to fungi to call it that. So far, I have been playing with the idea that it spreads in a few different ways. At first, direct contact with the infectious disease is enough to contract it where it then invades your body and does its thing. From there though, it spreads via possibly animals that come in contact with it and spreads to trees where it invades "open wounds" in the bark where mushrooms grow from. The spores spread only relatively a short distance from there to potentially other trees, or being carried by other animals around.

In humans though, the spores get into the lungs and the hypha and there it develops and spreads. Slowly killing the human as it eats away at your lungs from the inside out.

So this disease spreads through a variety of organisms / ways. What I'm wondering is, does it make sense that this fungus can be spread by droplets being coughed up by infected individuals? Almost like rapidly developing spores inside their lungs that spread on the air for a short distance? Then when the humans die from it in like a couple of days, the fungus sprouts fruiting bodies from the human itself, bursting through the chest etc. You get the idea.

I'm really playing with this disease as kind of a world-destroyer but also a world-builder where it modifies it's environment and the organisms as it spreads and grows. Almost like it is intelligent. So in this case close contact with the spores will infect you from like trees and maybe animals, but with humans it acts more like the flu spreading on tiny water droplets coughed up by the lungs.

EDIT ***

The main question I am going after here is can a fungus-like disease spread by coughing up spores? Does that make sense as a mode of transmission?

posted almost 5 years ago

Nick Quillin‭

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