Blastomyces helicus, an Emerging Dimorphic Fungal Pathogen Causing Fatal Pulmonary and Disseminated Disease in Humans and Animals in Western Canada and United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Blastomyces helicus (formerly Emmonsia helica) is a recently described dimorphic fungus first isolated from a man who died of encephalitis in Alberta, Canada. The geographic range, epidemiology and clinical features are unknown. Methods We reviewed clinical and veterinary isolates of Blastomyces and Emmonsia at the University of Alberta Microfungus Collection and Herbarium and the UT Health San Antonio Fungus Testing Laboratory. Isolates were selected based on low B. dermatitidis DNA probe values and/or atypical morphology. DNA sequence analysis was performed. Epidemiological and clinical data were analyzed. Results Isolates of B. helicus were identified from eight human (Table 1) and five veterinary cases (Table 2). Mycelial and yeast-like phases of typical clinical isolates are shown in Figures 1 and 2, respectively. Isolates were referred from provinces and states shown in Figure 3. Conclusion Blastomyces helicus caused pulmonary and fatal disseminated disease, mainly in immunocompromised persons, and lung disease in companion animals in western Canada and US. Epidemiological investigations are needed to establish the burden of disease and geographic range of this pathogen. Disclosures All authors: No reported disclosures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".