LASTOMYCOSIS is a fungus disease found B endemically throughout the Mississippi Valley, Ohio Valley, and the southeastern United States. It commonly involves the lungs, skin, and other soft tissues. Among the fungus diseases, blastomycosis seems to have a special predilection for bone, and bony involvement in any part of the skeleton is fairly common. The infection may extend from these areas of bone involvement and rupture into a joint, secondarily producing an arthritis. Indeed this is stated as the mechanism of the production of blastomycosis arthritis by most writers1 Elowever, it is not commonly appreciated that blastomycosis may primarily involve joints without evidence of bony involvement and thus present as a monoarticular arthritis. It is the purpose of this paper to call attention to this mode of presentation and to report our experience with blastomycosis arthritis.
METHODS
Selection of Patients
There have been 74 cases of blastomycosis at the University of Arkansas Medical Center and the Little Rock Veterans Administration Hospital between 1945 and 1965. Of this number, 23 had bone and/or joint involvement. From these 23 patients the present nine cases were chosen because joint involvement was either the primary or a prominent component of their illness; 6 of the 9 presented essentially as mono-articular arthritis. 'The clinical, laboratory, and radiologic findings on these 9 cases are summarized in Table . Detailed reports on two cases are presented to illustrate certain salient points.