Abstract
This review focuses on aspects of antimycotic therapy specific to veterinary medicine. In the first part, drug availability, limited mostly by economic consideration but also by clinical applicability and specific adverse effects, is described for polyenes, 5 fluorocytosine, azoles, echinocandins and terbinafine. In the second part, current knowledge and experience in the treatment of selected fungal infections are overviewed. These mycoses include disseminated mold infections in small animals (dogs and cats) and avian species, upper respiratory tract infections of small animals (sino-nasal and sino-orbital aspergillosis) and horses (guttural pouch mycosis), eumycetoma, infections caused by dimorphic fungi, (blastomycosis, histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, paracoccidioidomycosis and sporothrichosis) and by yeasts and yeast-like microorganism (Cryptococcus spp. and Malassezia pachydermatis).
Highlights
IntroductionVeterinary medical mycology often differs from the human counterpart by, among others, the clinical aspects (beyond the scope of this review), the variety of fungi involved and the antimycotic drugs available for use
Veterinary medical mycology often differs from the human counterpart by, among others, the clinical aspects, the variety of fungi involved and the antimycotic drugs available for use
Changes in the range of fungi involved in animal mycoses stems mostly from emergence of new pathogens such as Cryptococcus gattii or Sporothrix brasiliensis, increased awareness, or changes in taxonomy due to improved molecular techniques such as has happened for the Pseudallescheria/Scedosporium/Lomentospora group [2]
Summary
Veterinary medical mycology often differs from the human counterpart by, among others, the clinical aspects (beyond the scope of this review), the variety of fungi involved and the antimycotic drugs available for use. Immunosuppression, induced by other infective agents or by medications, has led to a significant leap in the number of people affected and the species of fungi involved in human infections since the 1980s [1] In veterinary mycology, this phenomenon was not observed. The incentive to develop new antimycotic drugs for human medicine, having better pharmacological characteristics, a broader spectrum and fewer side effects, was driven to a large extent by the aforementioned surge in mycotic infections’ number and the variety of the etiological agents involved. Some of these newly developed antimycotic drugs (and a few older ones) are exceedingly expensive (detailed below). The lesions continued to develop for up to a month following therapy cessation and took about 2 weeks to heal [13]
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