A veterinary Atlas

Dear Friends of the Atlas, we are happy to announce that the first chapters of the Atlas of Veterinary Fungi is now open to the public in the website. Although still fragmentary, you already grasp the  idea of what this Atlas of animal diseases will look like. Just login on the regular website of Atlas of Clinical Fungi. Type “Mammalia” in chapter search and you will find reviews of cat, dog, platypus and ruminants, and type “Actinopterygii” and you will find a chapter on fish. This will be simplified in the future. Several more chapters are in preparation.

Animal diseases are at the origin of zoonoses and therefore very significant for human health. Even from the limited number of animals treated, the Atlas chapters show enormous differences between fungal floras that infect animal hosts. As appears from a nice little chapter written by Joanne Connolly, the warm-blooded Australian platypus, for example, is infected by only a single species: Mucor amphibiorum. Sybren de Hoog et al. noted that bony fish carry nearly only black fungi, particularly Exophiala species, while in contrast cartilaginous fishes are infected by Fusarium. Here are some major research questions on fungal virulence to be addressed. Even cat and dog show differences: cats are relatively susceptible to Sporothrix infection, while dogs are preferentially affected by Blastomyces, as can be concluded from the chapters by Patrizia Danesi et al. and Jacques Guillot et al. A very informative chapter on ruminants has been written by Henrik Jensen and Cecilie Becker.

The Atlas of Veterinary Fungi will be printed in the future, but that will still take a long time. For now, you can consult the chapters online if you have a subscription to Atlas of Clinical Fungi. You will note that not a single fungus is shown. No worries: just click on the name, and you will be brought to the respective page in the clinical Atlas, with full description, illustration and antifungal susceptibility. The references are stored in the same way, i.e. available online with individual links to each paper mentioned in the text.

We hope you will enjoy this new product.
Your Atlas Team.