Too Many Mouldy Joints – Marijuana and Chronic Pulmonary Aspergillosis

Chronic necrotizing pulmonary aspergillosis in a patient with diabetes and marijuana use.

Fatal aspergillosis associated with smoking contaminated marijuana, in a marrow transplant recipient.

A 34-year-old man presented with pulmonary aspergillosis on the 75th day after marrow transplant for chronic myelogenous leukemia. The patient had smoked marijuana heavily for several weeks prior to admission. Cultures of the marijuana revealed Aspergillus fumigatus with morphology and growth characteristics identical to the organism grown from open lung biopsy specimen. Despite aggressive anti...

Acute Aspergillus pneumonia associated with mouldy tree bark-chippings, complicated by anti-glomerular basement membrane disease causing permanent renal failure☆

A non-immunocompromised man developed acute Aspergillus pneumonia after spreading mouldy tree bark mulch. Despite normal renal function at presentation, he developed rapidly progressive glomerulonephritis with acute kidney injury due to anti-glomerular basement membrane antibodies (anti-GBM) 4 weeks later. He remained dialysis dependent and died of sepsis 10 months later. We hypothesise that he...

An aspergilloma caused by Aspergillus flavus.

Chronic pulmonary aspergillosis is broad term encompassing chronic cavitary, chronic fibrosing pulmonary aspergillosis and aspergilloma. All affect patients with structural lung diseases and many have subtle genetic immune defects. Almost all cases are caused by Aspergillus fumigatus. Here we report a patient with an aspergilloma which had Aspergillus flavus recovered from a surgical specimen a...

Does Biofilm Formation Play a Role in Ventilator-Associated Tracheobronchitis?

immune deficiency. However, two aspects of this report require further discussion. First, instead of invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA), we believe the precise diagnosis should be chronic necrotizing pulmonary aspergillosis (CNPA). To start with, the patient does not show any clinical symptoms of IPA, nor are her COPD symptoms getting any more severe. The occurrence of IPA in COPD patients ...