© 2004 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Thoracic Society
EDITORIAL
Pneumocystis jirovecii infection
Pneumocystis jirovecii infection
1 Centre for Sexual Health and HIV Research, Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, Royal Free and University College Medical School, University College London, London WC1E 6AU, UK
2 Positive Health Programme and Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, San Francisco General Hospital, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr R Miller
Centre for Sexual Health and HIV Research, Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, Royal Free and University College Medical School, University College London, London WC1E 6AU, UK; rmiller@gum.ucl.ac.uk
A review of Pneumocystis and the rationale for renaming it
Keywords: Pneumocystis carinii; Pneumocystis jirovecii; nomenclature
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The organism Pneumocystis causes severe pneumonia in individuals with immune systems impaired by HIV, transplantation, malignancy, connective tissue disease, and the treatment thereof. In HIV infected patients it remains a major pathogen in those who are unaware of their HIV serostatus, or who decline to take or are intolerant of highly active antiretroviral therapy. Pneumocystis also infects a wide variety of mammals and causes pneumonia in those that are immunosuppressed or immunodeficient. Originally Pneumocystis was thought to be a single species of protozoa. Study of the organism has been severely hampered by the fact that it cannot be cultured in vitro. Over the last 20 years, using molecular biological, immunological and other techniques, Pneumocystis has been shown to be a fungus, to be genetically diverse, host species specific, transmissible from animal to animal, to colonise individuals with minor degrees of immunosuppression, and to cause clinical disease by
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