Question

1. How do people become infected with systemic mycoses? How are systemic mycoses similar to and different from cutaneous and subcutaneous mycoses??

Answer 1

Systemic mycoses are fungal infections that infect internal organs of our body. The fungi enters our body through air, gut, paranasal sinuses or skin. The infections mostly results due to the inhalation of the fungal spores. Later the fungi spreads to the organs via our circulatory system including skin and this causes mutiple organs to fail.

Cutaneous mycoses affects skin and nails and caused by dermatophytes and causes no inflammatory response. subcutaneous mycoses as the name indicates affects subcutaneous tissues (e.g., candidiasis) and rarely spreads systemically. These both types of infections are confined mostly to the skin or mucous membrane and do not invade deeper into the tissues. Whereas, systemic mycoses is also known as deep mycoses as it infect internal organs like lungs, lymphatics and other organs and results in chronic inflammation.