Patients meeting May 2018

Beth led the way this month involving patients in the design of a new concertina-style credit card sized multifunctional information leaflet that is intended for patients to show when needed. For example in the case of an emergency admission to tell the attending doctors some details about aspergillosis and its specific requirements, a little about the specific limitations of antifungal drugs and more. This was a very popular idea and consequently will be developed further. Beth then went on to discuss the hugely encouraging testing results of several new antifungal drugs that was announced at the Advances Against Aspergillosis conference in February 2018

Prof Malcolm Richardson launched a new project to be carried out in his department (The Mycology Reference Centre Manchester which is closely attached to NAC). They are going to look at the microbes that are found in the homes of people who have aspergillosis (i.e. the home’s microbiome), and he showed us preliminary results that suggest that there is a lot of Aspergillus in the homes of those patients we have looked at so far, but we need to look at many more to establish a strong pattern. If successful we might well be able to establish a link between the microbes in peoples homes and aspergillosis. 

This study may seem an obvious thing to do but until very recently we did not have the technology to be able to do this. Advances in microbe identification techniques have made this possible .

BUT we will be able to do nothing unless you can help us! We need a pinch of household dust from the best microbe collector in your home – that is to say your vacuum cleaner dust bag. We will provide gloves, facemask and bag to do this so please don’t send us any dust until you have received our letter – to get a letter contact myself at graham.atherton@manchester.ac.uk with your postal address and I will pass on your details to Prof Richardson – we need 100 samples to do the experiment!

Resources mentioned:

National Aspergillosis Centre (NAC)

 Manchester Regional Mycology Manchester Centre

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