A research team from the College of Science at the University of Basrah, consists of Dr. Marwan Yassin Abdel Majeed, Dr. Ahmed Abdel Berghal, and researcher Israa Asaad Aziz, discovered a disease case recorded for the first time in the world, which is a fungus that affects the human eye.
One of the members of the discovering team, Dr. Marwan Yassin (immunology specialist), stated that this achievement that we reached is part of a research project for master's student Israa Asaad Aziz, where samples were collected from the eyes of people infected with certain microbes, and we found in one of the samples after cultivating them in the laboratories of the Department of Biology a type of microbe that was diagnosed with modern molecular methods through genetic material, and after processing the data, it was found that this microbe was not recorded as a pathogen that infects the human eye at all through searching in global databases. It aroused our attention greatly, and on the basis of it, participation in the International Scientific Conference on Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases took place in the form of a poster at the Canadian University of Toronto, and it was approved to publish the discovery as a research abstract in one of the international journals.
Dr. Saad Shaheen Hammadi confirmed that the achievements at the University of Basrah are successive, including their discovery of a type of fungus that was considered to coexist peacefully with humans, but we found that this type could cause some diseases in the event of its development and lack of human immunity.
Shaheen added that this research was registered globally, and we will support it at the University of Basrah, and it will be submitted to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and to the Ministry of Health, and we will expand the base of researchers in partnership with the College of Medicine, especially ophthalmologists. We hope that the research will be at the level of discovery, and God willing, our university will have a degree of responsibility to apply the research to serve all humanity.
