http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/treating-meningitis-caused-by-black-mould-a-challenge-1.1010523

WASHINGTON — The black mould creeping into the spines of hundreds of people who got tainted shots for back pain marks uncharted medical territory.

Never before has this particular fungus been found to cause meningitis. It’s incredibly hard to diagnose, and to kill — requiring at least three months of a treatment that can cause hallucinations. There’s no good way to predict survival, or when it’s safe to stop treating, or exactly how to monitor those who fear the fungus may be festering silently in their bodies.

“I don’t think there is a precedent for this kind of thing,” said Dr. Arjun Srinivasan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials and doctors have tracked down most of the 14,000 people potentially at risk for fungal meningitis, blamed for the deaths of 24 people and sickening more than 300.
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“This is definitely new territory for us,” he said.

The fungus’ brown-black colour signals an armour that — along with being injected near the spine —helped this mould sneak past the immune defences of otherwise healthy people, said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a fungal disease specialist at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

“What we’re dealing with here is fundamentally different” from a typical fungal infection, he said. “This is a bug that most of us don’t know much about.”

But they’re learning fast, piecing together clues that promise some hope.

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/treating-meningitis-caused-by-black-mould-a-challenge-1.1010523#ixzz2D0RZIPIP

Sounds like a Dr Who story.

Probably something Michael Crichton could get his teeth into in his early phase. Or maybe Wyndham could do it.

>>Or maybe Wyndham could do it.

Didn’t John Wyndham write Village of the Damned, David Copperfield and Moby Dick?

Fungus, CNS, death…sounds like a zombie film.

Current numbers of infected at 490, with 34 deaths.

Seems to be something about fungal melanins and pathogenicity.

http://www.fgsc.net/asilomar/melanin.html

Peak Warming Man said:

>>Or maybe Wyndham could do it.

Didn’t John Wyndham write Village of the Damned, David Copperfield and Moby Dick?

The last two under a psuedonem

One of the recent Radio National ABC Health Report discussed this common US technique of epidural injections of steroids for chronic back pain…. contamination of bulk stock from being prepared in the pharmacy ..

neomyrtus_ said:

One of the recent Radio National ABC Health Report discussed this common US technique of epidural injections of steroids for chronic back pain…. contamination of bulk stock from being prepared in the pharmacy ..

IMO, I find it highly odd that someone with chronic back pain would go for/be offered an epidural of steroids (considering lack of evidence and risk of adverse outcomes, highlighted in this case by some grubby compounding).

Bubblecar said:

Sounds like a Dr Who story.

Sounds more like a disease cluster tied to a relatively unknown pathogen with an unusual but readily identifiable mode of infection. Outbreaks of legionellosis were initially puzzling.

poikilotherm said:

neomyrtus_ said:

One of the recent Radio National ABC Health Report discussed this common US technique of epidural injections of steroids for chronic back pain…. contamination of bulk stock from being prepared in the pharmacy ..

IMO, I find it highly odd that someone with chronic back pain would go for/be offered an epidural of steroids (considering lack of evidence and risk of adverse outcomes, highlighted in this case by some grubby compounding).

well, yeah, they discussed this

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/healthreport/epidural-treatment-for-sciatica-pain/4379934

Norman Swan: We’re staying with prednisone-like drugs to treat pain, this time by injecting them into the spine for back pain radiating down the leg: sciatica.

A drug scandal in the United States has led to many deaths from spinal injections of steroids prepared by a compounding pharmacy where there was fungal contamination causing meningitis, which would be all the more tragic if steroids wouldn’t have done any good in the first place.

An Australian review of the practice has just been published. Here’s Professor Chris Maher of the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney.

Chris Maher: We were interested in trying to establish how effective epidural corticosteroids are for sciatica, which is a more severe form of back pain. So we did a review of the available clinical trials.

Norman Swan: So you’d just better explain what epidural injections are.

Chris Maher: So an epidural injection is where you insert a needle into the space before you hit the dura. And in this case it is an injection of a corticosteroid, which is an anti-inflammatory drug.

Norman Swan: So this is the same space that women get an anaesthetic for labour in.

Chris Maher: Yes, but in that case it’s an anaesthetic, in this particular procedure it’s injecting a corticosteroid and it is being used to deal with the inflammation associated with sciatica.

Norman Swan: Have you any idea how common this treatment is?

Chris Maher: It’s very hard to get good data in Australia, but in America it’s a very common procedure. In the Medicare funded number of these procedures, about half a million each year in the United States. It’s estimated somewhere around three million to four million are done in each year in the United States.

more on link

*compounding…I think what that pharmacy was doing was closer to ‘manufacturing’…

Luckily, Aus has some fairly tough laws to prevent something similar.

Clean room at the pharmacy…

“A leaking boiler left puddles on the floor, equipment was soiled with greenish-yellow residue and air conditioning was turned off at night, according to the inspection reports.”

poikilotherm said:

Clean room at the pharmacy…

“A leaking boiler left puddles on the floor, equipment was soiled with greenish-yellow residue and air conditioning was turned off at night, according to the inspection reports.”

Simply stunning.

Exserohilum rostratum is a grass leaf pathogen. All very interesting how common phyllospheric and rhizospheric (soil, leaf surface) critters turn up elsewhere.

http://www.scilogs.com/life_off_the_edge/exserohilum-rostratum-the-killing-fungus/

Indeed. Apparently there is not just the one fungus in the samples either, many samples have shown all sorts of various bacterial/fungal growth…the leaf critter seems to be the one killing people though.