Our goal is to improve the knowledge and skills of health professionals about fungal diseases through education.

GAFFI has partnered with Leading International Fungal Education (LIFE) to achieve this critical goal.

The expertise of the health professional impacts directly on patient outcome, especially in fungal diseases where early treatment is essential. Health professionals must consider a possible fungal infection when dealing with complex problems- eg cancers, AIDS, critical care & respiratory diseases. Some laboratory training is critical to make an accurate diagnosis. In addition, the treatment with antifungals is complex and pharmacists must be aware of drug –medicine interactions and therapeutic dose monitoring (TDM).

LIFE has developed the following resources:

1. A comprehensive summary of the most serious fungal illnesses and methods for their diagnosis and treatment, en-fungaleducation.org. The diagnostic section also contains information on the commercially available diagnostic kits here as well as dermoscopy and skin.

The entire site is also available in Spanish – choose language at the top right of each page.

2. The accessibility of good laboratory training is not just a problem in low resource countries. LIFE has developed the worlds first online microscopy and histopathology course in fungal disease. This has 4 modules and is intended to be self-taught for identifying different fungi in a wide variety of tissues; using only a light microscope and some simple stains  A grant from the Fungal Infection Trust has allowed the development of the world’s first online microscopy and histopathology course in fungal disease. This has 4 modules, and is intended to be a self–taught course for those with different levels of prior training and laboratory roles.  It is self-directed learning and requires only a light microscope and some simple stains. The first three modules are available in Spanish, French and Portuguese. The fourth module is for more experienced professionals.

3.  A drug interaction database for antifungals covering all the systemic antifungals and over 700 other approved drugs. Nearly 2500 drug interactions are known and over 400 are potentially life-threatening. In addition, apps for iPhone and Android are available for patients and healthcare professionals – search ‘antifungal interaction’ in the app stores.

The UK’s charity Fungal Infection Trust has supported The Aspergillus Website since 1998 and the website for patients since 2005.

 Resource video on Fungal diseases (Denning, Edinburgh 2015)