{"id":25837,"date":"2008-04-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisaclone.fapesp.br\/2008\/04\/01\/fungus-in-the-air\/"},"modified":"2017-08-14T16:33:10","modified_gmt":"2017-08-14T19:33:10","slug":"fungus-in-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/fungus-in-the-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Fungus in the air"},"content":{"rendered":"
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archives of the ial memory center<\/span><\/a> Lutz with daughter Bertha, in the laboratoryarchives of the ial memory center<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In the early 20th century, doctor and researcher Adolpho Lutz very carefully studied two patients in S\u00e3o Paulo with different illnesses that caused serious lesions and destroyed the gums\u2019 mucosa, with painful effects upon the ganglia. In April 1908, after almost three years of research, Lutz published two articles in Brazil-Medico \u2013 Revista Semanal de Medicina e Cirurgia [Brazil-Medical \u2013 Weekly Journal of Medicine and Surgery], in which he qualified the disease as a pseudococcidar mycosis, after identifying the fungus that caused it and describing its typical reproduction system.<\/p>\n

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archives of the ial memory center<\/span><\/a> Issue with Lutz\u2019s first articlearchives of the ial memory center<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhat Lutz did was highly remarkable and rare,\u201d says pharmacist and biochemist Cezar Mendes de Assis, a researcher from the Adolpho Lutz Institute. \u201cHe described the disease, observed its agent in clinical material under a microscope, isolated it in cultures, showed that it was dimorphous (had two distinct forms, mildew at 27\u00baC and yeast at 36\u00baC), described its characteristics, reproduced the disease in different laboratory animals and re-isolated the agent.\u201d Furthermore, he was worried about claiming that he had discovered a new disease and warned of the difficulty of differentiating it from similar conditions.<\/p>\n

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Issue with Lutz\u2019s first article <\/span><\/a> LutzIssue with Lutz\u2019s first article <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The name for the disease since 1971, after a specialists congress held in Colombia, is paracoccidiomycosis, although it has had several names since 1908 \u2013 one of them being \u201cLutz\u2019s disease.\u201d It is a mycosis caused by the fungus Paracoccidiodes brasiliensis, found in rural areas and that most often enters the human body via inhalation. When not diagnosed at the right time it causes skin sores and mouth lesions, may contaminate the lungs, spleen and liver, and may infiltrate the bones, joints and central nervous system. Some of the risk activities are linked to agriculture, gardening and transporting vegetables. Deforestation and preparing the soil for planting increase the number of particles of the fungus in suspension.<\/p>\n

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archives of the ial memory center<\/span><\/a> Collecting snails in the countryarchives of the ial memory center<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

As notification is not compulsory, there is a shortage of accurate information about the incidence of this mycosis in Brazil. Health Ministry data show 3,181 deaths from 1980 to 1995 and a mortality rate of 1.45 cases per million inhabitants. \u2018Consensus about paracoccidiomycosis\u2019, a technical report published in 2006 by the Revista da Sociedade de Medicina Tropical (Journal of the Society of Tropical Medicine), showed that few people exposed to the fungus develop the disease. When the mycosis manifests itself, however, the public health problem becomes significant because mortality rates are high \u2013 those who do not die are frequently disabled and unable to work. For the time being there is no effective vaccine.<\/p>\n

After the pioneering articles in 1908, the mycosis continued to be studied. Italian bacteriologist Alfonso Splendore and S\u00e3o Paulo mycologist Floriano Paulo de Almeida added substantially to understanding it. In the same year in which he published his research, Lutz (1855-1940) left the Bacteriological Institute of S\u00e3o Paulo (now the Adolfo Lutz Institute), where he had been director for 15 years, and returned to his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, to work solely as a researcher. A lover of the solitude of laboratory work and field collecting, to the end of his life he remained at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, where he continued studying topics of medical or purely biological interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adolpho Lutz published two articles describing a new disease, 100 years ago","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[247,260],"coauthors":[104],"class_list":["post-25837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospect","tag-medicine","tag-public-health"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25837"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=25837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}