Posts By: Graham Atherton

 A Brazilian University is forming a new international partnership with researchers from Manchester to carry out more research into the  fungal lung infection which causes chronic illness in  at least three million people worldwide and has a fatality of 75%. Colleagues at the Escola Paulista de Medicina-Federal University of Sao Paulo (UNIFESP) will work alongside… Read more »

GAFFI is calling all policy makers and health agencies to wake up to the plight of more than 300 million people worldwide who suffer and die every year from fungal disease. GAFFI was set up in 2013 to highlight what doctors believe is a worldwide catastrophe that is growing year on year, yet could be halted with… Read more »

Beauty, they say, is skin deep. Try telling that to the Babassu ‘breakers’ – the women of South America, Africa and Asia who for a hundred years have worked to harvest the oil from this special type of coconut, and ended up with an incurable skin fungal infection that disfigures, socially excludes them from their… Read more »

In French Guiana, disseminated histoplasmosis (DH) is the most common AIDS-defining illness (15.4/1,000 person years in HIV patients) and carried the highest mortality. Overall mortality was 45.3%, with a median time to death of 110 days, at an average age of 37 years. But over 20 years (1992-2011), two major changes were seen. The early… Read more »

At the ICAAC 2014 conference being held in Washington DC, data for a further 6 country “burdens of serious fungal disease”  has been estimated, for 260 million people. The rate of candidaemia in Saudi Arabia is amongst the highest in the world at 10/100,000 which contrasts with low rates in Argentina (1.1/100,000) and Australia (1.87/100,000)…. Read more »

High opening pressure at lumbar puncture (LP) (spinal tap) is recognised as a poor prognostic feature of cryptococcal meningitis. For these patients repeated LP is advocated, including the use of lumbar drains or ventricular shunts in some cases. In a provocative paper from Uganda, Rolfes and colleagues found that at least one ‘therapeutic’ LP for… Read more »

To a packed audience of researchers and science policy makers, GAFFI President Dr David Denning described the enormous and under-appreciated burden of fungal infections at the International Union of Microbiological Societies meeting in Montreal. Very large numbers of people are affected, and many fungal disease estimates have yet to be made, so estimates are incomplete…. Read more »

A new lateral flow device has been invented by Prof Chris Thornton of Exeter University, UK, to accurately diagnose invasive pulmonary aspergillosis. The affordable device uses a highly specific monoclonal antibody which detects a diagnostic marker of Aspergillus infection and uses a small blood sample. Aspergillosis is a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose -affecting many… Read more »

In an environmental sampling study carried out in 44 schools in Taiwan an increase in fungal spores in the air was associated with worsening asthma. The rate of asthma in children (6-15 years) in Taiwan has risen from 6% to 11% in 10 years. Surveying 7,154 children in 264 classrooms across Taiwan, Chi-Hsien Chen and… Read more »

A 21-year-old medical student has made a major discovery, which will help doctors better able to diagnose and treat patients with Cystic Fibrosis (CF). Jo Armstead spent hundreds of hours accessing data from 30 countries to discover that there are over 75,000 people with the genetic disorder, of whom half are over 18 years –… Read more »