Blastomycosis
| Blastomycosis | |
|---|---|
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|
| Skin lesions of blastomycosis. | |
| Classification and external resources | |
| Specialty | Infectious disease |
| ICD-10 | B40 |
| ICD-9-CM | 116.0 |
| DiseasesDB | 1439 |
| MedlinePlus | 000102 |
| eMedicine | med/231 ped/254 |
| MeSH | D001759 |
Blastomycosis (also known as "North American blastomycosis", "Blastomycetic dermatitis", and "Gilchrist's disease") is a fungal infection of humans and other animals, notably dogs and occasionally cats, caused by the organism Blastomyces dermatitidis. Endemic to portions of North America, blastomycosis causes clinical symptoms similar to histoplasmosis. The disease occurs in several endemic areas the most important of which is in eastern North America, particularly in the western and northern periphery of the Great Lakes Basin, extending eastward along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River Valley and southward in the territory spanned by the central Appalachian Mountains in the east, to the Mississippi River Valley in the west. Sporadic cases have been reported in continental Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent.
Blastomycosis was first described by Thomas Casper Gilchrist in 1894 and sometimes goes by the eponym Gilchrist's disease. It is also sometimes referred to as Chicago Disease.
Among a skeletal series of Late Woodland Native Americans and later burial populations (the Mississippians, AD 900-1673) Dr. Jane Buikstra found evidence for what may have been an epidemic of a serious spinal disease in adolescents and young adults. Several of the skeletons showed lesions in the spinal vertebrae in the lower back. There are two modern diseases that produce lesions in the bone similar to the ones Dr. Buikstra found in these prehistoric specimens - spinal TB and blastomycosis. The bony lesions in these two diseases are practically identical. Blastomycosis seems more probable as these young people in Late Woodland and Mississippian times may have been afflicted because they were spending more time cultivating plants than their Middle Woodland predecessors had done. If true, it would be another severe penalty Late Woodland people had to pay as they shifted to agriculture as a way of life, and it would be a contributing factor to shortening their lifespans compared to those of the Middle Woodland people.
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