"He stood up, undid his belt with extreme awkwardness, and dropped his trousers.    'Look!' said Juan. 'It hurts me a lot.  It even hurts at night.'   Two red patches, slightly scaly at the edges, spread widening up his inner thighs and disappeared under his pants.  The fungus had got him." (quoted from In Trouble Again - A journey between the Orinoco and the Amazon by Redmond O'Hanlon).

A 23-year-old bricklayer appeared at hospital with a 3-month history of running sores on his upper lip.  Bald spots were appearing where the hair of his beard had fallen out...  Five months before, he had noted that the muzzle of his dog was infected, and that its hair had fallen out.  Cultures from Man and dog were identified as Trichophyton mentagrophytes, a common cause of skin, hair and nail infections in man and beast.  Ketoconazole (200 mg twice a day for a month) produced a cure, but the moral of the tale is clear: kiss your dog at your peril.  (adapted from Mycena News, newsletter of the Mycological Society of San Francisco, September 1998)

Three rather different groups of fungi actually cause specific diseases. A few fungi (dermatophytes), like the one that got Juan, have evolved a rather specific ability to attack the outer surface of human beings. A few other fungi which cause disease in people are normally soil organisms, but have also adapted to life in the unusual and rather hostile environment of the human body, often responding to this environment by developing a different morphology (thermal dimorphic saprobes). A third group of opportunistic saprobes can attack us only when our defences are down -- when our immune systems themselves are diseased or deficient, or when we artificially suppress them, as we must to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs.

We can divide fungal attacks on our persons into:
(1) cutaneous infections, which involve the outer layers of the skin and cause an allergic or inflammatory response;
(2) subcutaneous infections, usually involving fungi of low inherent virulence which have been introduced to the tissues through a wound of some kind, and which remain localized or spread only by direct mycelial growth; and
(3) systemic infections, which are caused, either by true pathogenic fungi which can establish themselves in normal hosts, or by opportunistic saprobic fungi which could not infect a healthy host, but can attack individuals whose immune system is not working. Both kinds of fungi sometimes become widely disseminated through the body of the host.

Following are some pictures .... for the full text please refer to the book or CD-ROM

Subcutaneous infections

Systemic mycoses