FREAKY FUNGUS
When a 53-year-old man arrived at a Missouri hospital complaining of persistent itchy patches on his lower back and buttocks, doctors were initially puzzled by the strange wart-like marks, so decided to investigate further. After testing the lesions, they found “budding fungal organisms” and confirmed this with a urine test that identified the culprit as the fungus , which is usually found in decomposing wood, leaves and moist soil. In rare cases it can cause blastomycosis, an infection caused by inhaling the fungus’s spores with symptoms including fever, cough, night sweats, muscle or joint pain, weight loss, chest pain and fatigue. In even rarer cases can cause skin infection, and in this case, it turned out that the patient worked as a landscape gardener and frequently received minor skin injuries from tree bark in the course of his work, so his infection had most likely been caused by being scraped by trees. Blastomycosis
