Keratitis caused by the recently described new species Aspergillus brasiliensis: two case reports.
BACKGROUND
Human infections caused by Aspergillus brasiliensis have not yet been reported. We describe the first two known cases of fungal keratitis caused by Aspergillus brasiliensis.


METHODS
A 49-year-old Indian Tamil woman agricultural worker came with pain and defective vision in the right eye for one month. Meanwhile, a 35-year-old Indian Tamil woman presented with a history of a corneal ulcer involving the left eye for 15 days. The fungal strains isolated from these two cases were originally suspected to belong to Aspergillus section Nigri based on macro- and micromorphological characteristics. Molecular identification revealed that both isolates represent A. brasiliensis.


CONCLUSIONS
The two A. brasiliensis strains examined in this study were part of six keratitis isolates from Aspergillus section Nigri, suggesting that this recently described species may be responsible for a significant proportion of corneal infections caused by black Aspergilli. The presented cases also indicate that significant differences may occur between the severities of keratitis caused by individual isolates of A. brasiliensis.
Manikandan
Palanisamy
P
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Science and Informatics, University of Szeged, Közép fasor 52, H-6726 Szeged, Hungary. kredics@bio.u-szeged.hu.
Varga
János
J
Kocsubé
Sándor
S
Revathi
Rajaraman
R
Anita
Raghavan
R
Dóczi
Ilona
I
Németh
Tibor Mihály
TM
Narendran
Venkatapathy
V
Vágvölgyi
Csaba
C
Bhaskar
Madhavan
M
Manoharan
Chockaiya
C
Samson
Robert A
RA
Kredics
László
L