Fournier's gangrene

Excerpt

We read with interest the paper of Yoshida et al. about Fournier's gangrene after unrelated cord blood stem cell transplantation in a recent issue of your journal [1]. The authors speculate that the incidence of this disease may be much higher than previously recognized, and in fact, Fournier's gangrene is no longer a rare entity. While between 1764 and 1978 only 386 cases were reported in the medical literature [2], from 1989 until now more than 1100 new cases have been published in the English-language literature [3]. However, in bone marrow transplanted individuals during the cytopenic phase, it has only been reported four times before. We would like to shortly communicate one case of a man who was treated with chemotherapy for autologous peripheral stem cell mobilization and suffered from life-threatening Fournier's gangrene after only a few days of neutropenia. …