Isolation of Microsporum gallinae from a fighting cock (Gallus gallus domesticus) in Japan

A case of tinea corporis caused by Microsporum gallinae was found in 2011 in Okinawa, located in the southern part of Japan. The patient was a 96-year-old, otherwise healthy, Japanese man, who had been working as a breeder of fighting cocks for more than 70 years. He was bitten on his right forearm by one of the cocks and a few weeks later, two erythematous macules appeared on the right forearm, accompanied by a slight itchy sensation. While the first isolate of this dermatophyte was recovered from the region by Miyasato et al. in 2011, it was not obtained from the same fighting cock owned by the patient. However, frequent exchanges of fighting cocks and special domestic breeds of chickens related to fighting, mating, and/or bird fairs are common among the fans and breeders. We investigated 238 chickens and 71 fighting cocks in Okinawa and in the suburbs of Tokyo (Chiba, Tokyo, Ibaraki, and Sizuoka). One isolate of M. gallinae from a fighting cock in Chiba Prefecture in the Tokyo metropolitan area exhibited a different genotype, with a single base difference from the patient isolate based on the internal transcribed spacer 1-5.8s-ITS2 regions (ITS1-5.8S-ITS2) of the ribosomal RNA gene sequence. The isolation of M. gallinae from a fighting cock on the mainland of Japan is the first such finding in animals in our country.