Rare fungal infection outbreak forces temporary closure of U.S. factory

LOS ANGELES, April 14 (Xinhua) -- An unusual fungal infection outbreak at a paper mill in the U.S. state of Michigan, which infected more than 90 employees as of Friday, forced the factory to be closed for up to three weeks.

Billerud, a Swedish pulp and paper manufacturer who owns the factory located in the city of Escanaba, announced Thursday night that the shutdown is a precaution to try and prevent any additional blastomycosis exposures.

According to Billerud, the company was first notified about possible blastomycosis infections on March 3. The local health department for Delta and Menominee Counties was notified by a local hospital that they had found several atypical pneumonia infections, all from people affiliated with the mill.

Follow-up testing, which took a couple of weeks, confirmed that some of the infections were caused by blastomycosis, a type of fungus that grows in moist soil and decomposing matter.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicated that once blastomycosis went inside a patient's lung, the body's warmth and moisture can transform the spores into yeast that can stay in the lungs or be transferred through the bloodstream to other parts of the body, including the skin, bones, joints, organs, brain and spinal cord.

Most people who breathe in the blastomyces spores don't get sick, but some develop symptoms that mimic a cold, the flu or other more common respiratory ailments: fever, cough, night sweats, muscle aches or joint pain, chest pain and extreme fatigue.

In some people, especially those with weakened immune systems, blastomycosis can become serious. Daily Mail reported Friday that one patient died from the Michigan's outbreak, however no other news outlet confirmed it.

People are infected by directly breathing in the fungal spores, meaning it cannot spread from person to person, the local WOOD-TV reported, adding there were 21 confirmed cases and 76 probable infections so far.

Michigan is a known risk area for blastomycosis infection, the report said, noting however that an official with Public Health Delta &Menominee Counties said there had never been an industrial outbreak like this documented in the United States.

States that track blastomycosis report only about one or two cases per 100,000 people a year. Deaths from the disease are similarly rare, with the CDC finding 1,216 blastomycosis-related deaths occurred in the United States from 1990 to 2010.