Posts By: Graham Atherton

Havana, 11th December:  (Read this in Spanish). Alongside the 80th anniversary of the Cuban Tropical Medicine Institute, 200 scientists and doctors sought common actions to reduce the stigmatizing burden of chromoblastomycosis. This persistent and progressive fungal infection is usually caused by a trivial injury, usually on the leg or arm, and has recently been recognised… Read more »

Skin specialists around Pakistan have highlighted the fact that common fungal infections affecting the skin are now the leading cause of patients visiting skin hospital and clinics. Despite the prevalence of such infections and the reality of 3.2 million Pakistanis living with serious infections including keratitis, which can cause blindness, and the life-threateningCandida auris infection, researchers… Read more »

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 »