Patho-morphological study of a spontaneous case of mycotic pneumonia in sheep

Mycotic pneumonia was diagnosed in a three months old lamb based on gross, histopathology and special staining studies. Clinically, the animal was apparently healthy but on post-mortem examination, lungs revealed small, multiple, coalescing nodules embedded in the parenchyma. Histological sections of lungs revealed diffuse necrotic and granulomatous inflammation with numerous, branched filamentous PAS positive fungal hyphae surrounded by lymphocytes and neutrophils. This finding is confirmatory in the diagnosis of multifocal embolic mycotic pneumonia with intralesional identification of aseptate branched fungal hyphae characteristic to Zygomycetes spp. from histological sections of lungs in absence of isolation and other confirmatory tests.