A study designed to determine the various clinical, epidemiologic, and diagnostic aspects of paracoccidioidomycosis was undertaken. Clinical studies revealed that most of the patients had pulmonary involvement either as the only manifestation of the disease (46.1%) or in combination with other manifestations (47.3%). Mucous-membrane lesions were second in importance (51.0%). More than 90.0% of the patients were over 30 years of age, all but one were males, and more than 80.0% worked in occupa...

Paracoccidioidomycosis is a systemic mycosis of importance in Latin America. Because of its polymorphic manifestations, it is not always suspected and patients are sometimes misdiagnosed. Case histories of patients with Paracoccidioidomycosis are presented in order to illustrate its various manifestations, with emphasis on the primary pulmonary localization.

The fungus Paracoccidioides is a prevalent human pathogen endemic to South America. The genus is composed of five species. In this report, we use 37 whole-genome sequences to study the allocation of genetic variation in Paracoccidioides We tested three genome-wide predictions of advanced speciation, namely, that all species should be reciprocally monophyletic, that species pairs should be highly differentiated along the whole genome, and that there should be low rates of interspecific gene ex...

Research on Paracoccidioides brasiliensis has centered in the yeast cell probably because of the lack of distinctive features in the mycelium. In 1942 and for the first time, lateral conidia were noticed in the fungus' hyphae. Later on, Brazilian, Venezuelan and Argentinean researchers described "aleurias" when the fungus was grown in natural substrates. In 1970 authors became interested in the conidia and were able to obtain them in large numbers and treat them as individual units. Their sha...

The precise diagnosis of paracoccidioidomycosis, in most cases, is established by direct methods and indirect immunological tests. The latter method is reliant on the identification of the host's humoral responses, which are usually impaired or absent in patients with severe juvenile forms of the disease and in immunocompromised patients. Determining disease activity or assessing treatment responses by measuring antibody levels is difficult, since antibody titer may remain elevated or persist...

The antigenic relationship of six different strains of Paracoccidioides brasiliensis was investigated by the agar-gel immunodiffusion test. Soluble antigens prepared from the two morphological phases of the fungus were diffused against human sera obtained from eight patients with paracoccidioidomycosis (South American blastomycosis). The mycelial phase showed common antigenic determinants as revealed by the formation of identical precipitin bands. The yeast phase proved to be more complex. Mo...

The natural habitat of Paracoccidioides brasiliensis remains undefined but the repeated demonstration of infection by this fungus in the nine-banded armadillo Dasypus novemcinctus has opened interesting research avenues. We report here the isolation of this fungus from the spleen of a naked-tailed armadillo Cabassous centralis (Miller 1899) captured in a coffee farm localized in the Colombian endemic area for paracoccidioidomycosis. This particular isolate was identified by its dimorphism and...