New Opportunistic Infections — More Opportunities

Abstract

Many of the infectious diseases that occur in patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) are caused by common pathogenic microbes, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, salmonella, Cryptococcus neoformans, and herpes simplex virus; the infections are just more severe, frequent, or difficult to treat than in uncompromised hosts. But a large number of infections in these patients are opportunistic, meaning that the etiologic microbes are either part of the normal adult flora or part of the nonpathogenic transient flora. Loss of the appropriate host defenses allows these typically avirulent organisms to produce the diseases, once rare, that are now . . .