The Real Cause of Athlete's Foot: How Foot Fungus Invades Skin
Athlete's foot rarely announces itself with drama. It begins as a quiet itch between two toes, a faint damp smell in a sock, a patch of skin that flakes when you finally take your shoes off at night. By the time most people look closely, a colony of microscopic fungi has already been living on their skin for weeks. Understanding how that colony arrives, and why it settles where it does, makes the condition far less mysterious. The word "fungus" makes people picture something visible, perhaps a bloom on old bread. The organisms behind athlete's foot are nothing like that. They are thread-like, invisible to the naked eye, and they feed on the same protein your skin, hair and nails are built from. The Organisms Behind the Itch Athlete's foot, known clinically as tinea pedis, is usually caused by a group of moulds called dermatophytes. The most common members of this group are Trichophyton rubrum and Trichophyton interdigitale, with Epidermophyton floccosum appea...