A worldwide increase in the frequency of fungal diseases has been reported in the last 3 or 4 decades. Knowing each country’s burden and epidemiologic trends of fungal diseases is necessary to prioritise prevention, diagnostics and therapeutic strategies. Country estimates for the burden serious fungal diseases have been published by Leading International Fungal Education (LIFE)… Read more »
Estimates of the number of serious fungal infections in Turkey, (population 79.8M), Norway (5.2M), Malawi (17.7M), Argentina (43.6M) were presented today in Belgrade at the Trends in Medical Mycology (TIMM) meeting. Fungal asthma was especially common in Argentina and Norway (606 and 340/100,000) and fewer cases in Turkey at 87.3/100,000, although there is likely some… Read more »
The Global Action Fund for Fungal infections, GAFFI, (www.gaffi.org) has been operational for 4 years and among its many successes, none is more important or indicative of its work, than directly saving lives in Guatemala. This program of implementing well known diagnostic tests in a reference laboratory, has picked up 139 life-threatening fungal infections in… Read more »
One of GAFFI’s priority diseases is fungal (mycotic) keratitis, which leaves 100,000’s blind in at least one eye each year. Professor Matthew Burton is a Wellcome Trust funded clinical researcher focused on corneal infection. He brings deep expertise in to GAFFI in microbial keratitis, with years of experience in Africa and many international collaborations. Matthew… Read more »
University of Manchester researchers have co-ordinated a ‘first of its kind’ series, published today in the prestigious journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.The series of papers gives new insights into the breadth of fungal diseases and a call to action for world health bodies to prevent millions of infections each year. Killing over 1.5 million and… Read more »
At the International AIDS Society conference in Paris today, Sile Molloy from St George’s Hospital Medical School in London presented the ACTA study results: the largest ever study of cryptococcal meningitis. 678 evaluable patients from 9 sites in 4 African countries were randomized into an all oral regimen of fluconazole (1200mg/d) and flycytosine (100mg/d), amphotericin… Read more »
In a 440 patients study in Vietnam, Dr Thuy Le and colleagues show that conventional amphotericin B is superior to itraconazole for the treatment of talaromycosis in AIDS. Their paper published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, finds not difference in 2 week mortality (6,2%), but a substantially higher mortality at 24… Read more »
GAFFI (Global Action For Fungal Infection) today welcomes news from the World Health Organisation (WHO) that it has classed the disease known as chromoblastomycosis – a disfiguring fungal disease of poor farmers in South America, Africa, and Asia – as a neglected tropical disease (NTD). Chromoblastomycosis also known as chromomycosis, is one of the most… Read more »
International HIV experts on fungal meningitis in AIDS report finding nearly 250,000 cases annually, 73% in sub-Saharan Africa. Fungal meningitis due to the Cryptococcus fungus typically affects those in the prime of life, 35 years old, and affects the tissues covering the brain and spinal cord. Of those affected an estimated 181,000 people die, despite… Read more »
For the fourth year running, multiple country burdens of fungal diseases have been presented at ECCMID; 4 countries covering a population of 351 million people. The remarkable findings were: The annual incidence of candidaemia in Italy is 24/100,000 and was estimated at 5/100,000 for Belarus, Cameroon and Indonesia, in the absence of data. Cryptococcal meningitis… Read more »
