ABSTRACT
The disease of the interdigital toe web space commonly referred to as "athlete's foot" has been shown to be a complex interaction of bacteria and dermatophytic fungi. This chapter considers variety of experiments regarding the pathogenesis of interdigital athlete's foot and found that resident bacteria collaborate with dermatophytic fungi to produce symptomatic athlete's foot. Five subjects with clinically normal, mycologically negative interspaces and five subjects with dermatophytosis simplex had both feet occluded for 10 days. Occlusion of dermatophytosis simplex will not result in the transformation to a symptomatic disease if the expansion of the microflora is prevented by topical application of bacteriostatic substances. In severe dermatophytosis complex, with its mixed population of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, it is difficult to estimate how much the former contributes to the symptomology. In dermatophytosis complex, a pure antifungal agent like tolnaftate brings about only a slow, modest improvement in a couple of weeks but is effective in the simple scaling form.
