DURING the years 1953-1955, the Medical Field Units of the Ministry of Health, Gold Coast (now Ghana), attempted to control ocular onchocerciasis in the Northern Territories by means of Antrypol (Suramin). A series of weekly injections of 1 g. was given to infested subjects for 5 weeks, with the object of eliminating the adult onchocercae. This scheme of treatment was initiated by Dr. B. B. Wad...

Pityriasis rubra pilaris (PRP) is a rare chronic inflammatory papulosquamous skin disease. Its clinical presentation and evolution is very variable. The most frequent clinical features are follicular papules, progressing to yellow-orange erythroderma with round small areas of normal skin and the well-demarcated palmoplantar keratoderma. Actually, six different types of PRP have been described b...

Erythroderma is a reactive, inflammatory skin disorder which could result from almost all inflammatory, some infectious and some malignant diseases. In adults, the commonest causes for erythroderma are psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, cutaneous T-cell lymphoma and drug reactions. Rarer causes include sarcoidosis, dermatomyositis, hypereosiniphilic syndromes, etc. In case the trigger remains uniden...

Staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome, associated with exfoliative toxin produced by phage group II Staphylococcus aureus, has recently been reported in an adult receiving immunosuppressive therapy. To determine the effect of immunosuppression on the development of the staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome, experimental animals were treated with prednisolone, azathioprine, or a combination of bot...

Erythroderma is an unusual cutaneous finding associated with dermatomyositis. There are only five cases of erythrodermic dermatomyositis reported in the English literature. We treated a case of erythrodermic dermatomyositis associated with a Bormann type 1 gastric cancer. The patient had a generalized, erythematous scaly eruption consistent with erythroderma and Gottron's papules as well as a h...

Dermatology nurses and other health care professionals may sometimes fail to appreciate and recognize the physical and emotional challenges faced by patients with a particular chronic dermatologic disease or condition. To better bring patients’ feelings and perceptions into focus, the Dermatology Nursing Editorial Board is excited to introduce a new series, “Patients’ Perspectives: Living With....

Cutaneous manifestations of haematological malignancies, although well recognized in acute monoblastic leukaemia and lymphoma, are relatively uncommon in primary myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which is a group of heterogeneous disorders formerly known as pre-leukaemia. Previously reported cases of skin involvement in this syndrome have been confined to a sub-type of MDS, namely chronic myelomo...

A 35-year-old female with borderline lepromatous (BL) leprosy who suffered from dapsone-induced erythroderma is reported. Sudden onset of erythroderma gave rise to a temporary arrest of the function of nail matrix with the resultant Beau's lines. She rapidly recovered with omission of dapsone and therapy with systemic corticosteroids and a topical emollient. In view of the potentially fatal hyp...

Sir, Pityriasis rubra pilaris (PRP) is an uncommon, idiopathic, papulosquamous disorder that often progresses to erythroderma and causes disabling keratoderma. The disease is classified into 5 groups on the basis of clinical appearance, behaviour and prognosis, as proposed by Griffiths in 1980 (1). Recently, a sixth group has been proposed in order to acknowledge the HIV-associated type of PRP ...

The last decade has seen considerable advances in our understanding of the genetic basis of skin disease, as a consequence of high throughput sequencing technologies including next generation sequencing and whole exome sequencing. We have now determined the genes underlying several monogenic diseases, such as harlequin ichthyosis, Olmsted syndrome, and exfoliative ichthyosis, which have provide...