Lawyer Featured in Column on Medical Mysteries
A lawyer from Arlington, Va., who had a rare lung disease is featured in a Washington Post column on medical mysteries.
The lawyer, Vicki Schulkin, suffered from a cough with “wracking, phlegmy paroxysms that had waxed and waned for nearly four years,” the column says.
Doctors were baffled. Asthma medications and antibiotics didn’t help, and no cancer was found. It wasn’t until a pulmonologist performed a bronchoscopy that the cause was found: Schulkin had a rare lung fungus often transmitted by rats leaving infected feces in the soil.
Doctors are still a bit surprised though. They say the disease is rare in someone without a weakened immune system, and it is most common Vietnam, Thailand and China. They suspect she got the disease from breathing infected soil, but they can’t be sure. And it usually has far worse effects.
Treatment with anti-fungal medications cleared up the problem.
