From India, from the state of Gujarat, the report of 300 cases of a rare infection, which could perhaps (also) be linked to Covid. It is caused by a particular species of fungi that first invade the tissues of the nose and mouth, suggesting even a dermatological disease, or a trivial sinusitis or a cold, but then attack the intestines and lungs, sometimes reaching the brain. The pathology is normally found in immunosuppressed people, including, sometimes even those affected by Coronavirus treated with massive doses of steroid drugs that fight serious lung infections, but can lower the immune defenses in organisms already weak in themselves originally from this point of view.
Who gets hit
Infection, as noted by Peter Collignon, of the Committee for Antibiotic Resistance and Infectious Diseases, of the World Health Organization, requires many and expensive pharmacological treatments to be treated and often surgery must also be resorted to. The fungi, or rather the molds, responsible, the mucormycetes, commonly live in the soil and on plants, but can cause the disease only in immunosuppressed people. Other categories of people who can be attacked, as we have also written in the Corriere Salute online Infectious Diseases Forum, are those with cancer or diabetes mellitus, and those in general immunosuppressed in important steroid treatment.
The disease can also affect those who, for work reasons, have to move earth, mud, manure, but fortunately the vast majority of people have a strong enough immune system to prevent their development
The diagnosis
The diagnosis is made starting from the symptoms, which include, among other things, pain and redness in the eyes and nose and then also fever, headache, cold, vomiting or mucus with bleeding, toothache, blurred vision, pain in one side of the face. Confirmation of suspicions comes from tissue and fluid analysis.
The cure
Mucormircosis is difficult to treat. As they wrote in the Corriere Salute online, it starts with a pharmacological intervention and then arrives, if necessary, to surgical treatment to remove necrotic tissues. After first-line therapy, once healing is achieved, a maintenance period with antifungals is recommended in several cases. In cases of rhino-orbito-cerebral involvement, evaluated with tomographic images, surgical intervention becomes essential to prevent the spread of the fungus to the central nervous system.
May 11, 2021 (change May 11, 2021 | 19:19)
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