Background

Fungal infections and current diagnostic tools

The most common fungal infections are superficial skin, nails and mucosal infections, which are caused in most cases by fungi of the genus Candida. These infections are usually not life threatening and have such common manifestations as athlete's foot and vulvovaginal candidiasis.

Invasive fungal infections, on the other hand, have unacceptably high mortality rates. Patients with a compromised immune system -such as AIDS patients and post-transplantation patients taking immunosupresants- are at special risk as they don't have the usual barriers that prevent invasive infections in healthy individuals.

According to Brown, et al., (2012), more than 90% of the reported deaths caused by fungi are associated with species from four genera: Cryptococcus, Candida, Aspergillus and Pneumocystis, but epidemiological data for fungal infections is poor, as these infections are often misdiagnosed and there is a lack of accurate data from the developing world.

Endemic dimorphic fungosis

The following map is an adaptiation of the information presented in Brown, et al., (2012), where the authors make some comments regarding the quality of that information: 1) the data is extrapolated from a few and geographically localized studies and 2) accurate data is lacking from the developing world and the calculations may underestimate the true values of the presented statistics.

Opportunistic invasive fungoses

Opportunistic fungoses affect those patients with a compromised immune system, such as AIDS patients and patients taking immunosupresants, particularly those patients that were intervened with a solid transplantation. The following interactive graphic is also an adaption of the information presented in Brown et al., (2012).

From top to bottom, the data on the upper-right corner is the following: 1) Disease name, 2) Organism, 3) mortality rates (% in infected populations) and 4) estimated life threatening infections per year worldwide.