COVID-19: Vitamin A deficiency and rhino-orbital mucormycosis (Black Fungus)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mucormycosis is a serious and fatal disease characterized by rhino-orbital and cerebral involvement caused by a rare but opportunistic fungal pathogen. Mucormycosis, also known as black fungus, caused fear and panic with a sudden and devastating rise in India during the second wave of the COVID-19 epidemic (April to June 2021). Although the reason for the sharp rise of mucormycosis in the COVID-19 epidemic is still controversial, its frequent occurrence in diabetic COVID-19 patients has associated mucormycosis with diabetes. However, the fact that mucormycosis is also seen in isolated vitamin A deficiency, non-diabetic COVID-19 patients, measles, and AIDS patients suggests that vitamin A deficiency may be under the pathogenetic mechanism. Vitamin A deficiency has previously been shown to develop in measles, AIDS, and COVID-19. Mucormycosis is an opportunistic infection mainly seen in people whose immune system is suppressed due to malignancy, chemotherapy, and AIDS. It is known that vitamin A deficiency also causes a kind of nutritional immunodeficiency picture. Therefore, the tendency to fungal, viral, and bacterial infections increases in vitamin A deficiency, and eye involvement is also common. Vitamin A deficiency also causes decreased tear secretion and deterioration of the anatomical/physiological defense barrier of the eye. In vitamin, A deficiency, besides microbial keratitis in the eye, night blindness, xerophthalmia, conjunctivitis (pink eye), Bitot spots, keratomalacia, and retinopathy also develop. Night blindness is considered the first sign of vitamin A deficiency, while Xerophthalmia is pathognomonic for vitamin A deficiency. We think that vitamin A deficiency is responsible for mucormycosis seen in COVID-19 patients and that vitamin A replacement with antifungals may have preventive and therapeutic value against COVID-19-related mucormycosis and other ocular symptoms.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 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".