Course medical mycology for the Americas

After several successful courses in Europe, China and Brazil, we will now organize a course in medical mycology in Chicago, USA. There is an enlarging gap between the increasing fungal infections and the decreasing laboratory skillsets to identify these medically important fungi causing human infections. The course includes a panel of internationally recognized medical mycologists, pathologists, pharmacists, and infectious disease specialists with experts in fungal disease diagnosis to provide a great educational venue to fill the gap. Objectives of the course are to demonstrate the fungi that cause human disease, to learn practical laboratory approaches to identify medically important fungal organisms and to understand the coherence of the fungal kingdom beyond strings of nucleotides; clinical aspects of fungal disease and therapy will be explained.

The Atlas of Clinical Fungi will be the core of this intensive educational week. The printed version of the book is the best teaching material to find your way through the fungal Kingdom. The Atlas is arranged according to main phylogenetic groups, starting with pseudo- and lower fungi, then Basidio– and Ascomycota which initiate with large sections on yeasts, and then followed by the filamentous fungi. Every group starts with an explanation and short overview. For example, all the clinically relevant orders of the Ascomycota are briefly introduced, so that you understand the relationship of Aspergillus and Talaromyces – which is lost when genera are arranged alphabetically; it explains what dermatophytes are and where they are located phylogenetically, and it explains what black fungi are. The website is a searchable database, with your searches being enhanced once you have leaped through the book. 

Our courses apply both forms of publication of the data. As the Atlas is updated on a regular basis, the contents of the course also varies every year. Presentations follow the same arrangement as given in the book, as questions in lower fungi differ significantly from items prevalent in Ascomycota. In the USA course, we have a panel of world-class experts to explain the main clinical topics.

The course will be organized by the Foundation Atlas in cooperation with FLDC (Fungal Diagnostics Laboratory Consortium),
7-12 November, 2022 at Loyola University Medical Center, Chicago, USA. For information and registration, click here.