Health professionals have warned that "the world is not prepared" after two women were confirmed to have been infected with a new highly contagious fungal disease. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said the patients from the United States, aged 28 and 47, tested positive for the ringworm, also known as tinea, reports the Mirror.
The pair suffered from lesions on their neck, buttocks, thighs and abdomen and family members also had symptoms too. Professor of Infectious Diseases in Global Health at the University of Manchester, David Denning, revealed the infection is now thought to be spreading across countries.
He said: “Skin fungal infections are transmitted from one person to another in schools, homes and with intimate contact. This new terbinafine-resistant fungus is a new species called Trichophyton indotineae and first identified in India. The huge Indian diaspora has already seen this fungus spread to other countries including Canada and Germany, and now the USA."
The 28-year-old woman says the scaly rashes first appeared on her body in the middle of 2021 and sought medical attention in December that year. Mr Denning added: "The infection itself is obvious to see and highly inflammatory in the skin."
A dermatologist diagnosed the woman with tinea and gave her antifungal treatment in January 2022 after her baby was born. But, this did not make any difference, according to medics.
Next the woman was then given a month-long course of the antifungal itraconazole and the rash eventually lifted. The patient had not travelled abroad recently, so officials state that the infection must have been spread locally in the US.
The second woman, 47, started to get huge rashes while she was travelling abroad, in Bangladesh. When she got home she tried applying creams to try and get ride of her rashes but they made no difference.
In late 2022 her rashes started to spread so she visited medics on three separate occasions. She was eventually given two four-week medication courses and they helped to improve the rash by some 80 per cent.
The 47-year-old's husband and son were also experiencing symptoms including widespread, scaly ring-like rashes. The strain of ringworm was tested by officials, which came back as Trichophyton indotineae, which is currently tearing through India and other parts of South Asia.
Mr Denning said medics had been treating infections successfully until a new fungal species arrived. He said: "For two decades, we have been treating these infections with oral terbinafine for 3 weeks, very successfully, until this new fungal species arrived.
"The most plausible explanation for its emergence is the frequent use in India of topical terbinafine ( cream and ointment), which doesn’t completely cover the infected area or penetrate deeply into the skin, allowing escape of resistant variants.
"Fortunately itraconazole at a dose of 400mg daily is usually effective. But knowing if the fungus is or is not this unusual species and whether it is resistant to terbinafine or not requires specialised testing in a mycology laboratory."
Mr Denning revealed that higher temperatures driven by climate change and resistant medication will cause an epidemic of skin infections and issued a dire warning.
He added: "There are not enough such laboratories, but there are rapid tests for resistance commercially available. The world is not yet prepared for what will likely become a slowly evolving epidemic of these skin infections.”
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