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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, everything you wanted to know about ringworm and then some. Avram Kaplan is an

assistant professor of dermatology at New York University and talks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about

this common skin infection and some not so common changes now being seen around the world.

Let's listen. Dr. Avram Kaplan, thank you so much for joining me on public health on call to talk about ringworm.

And I want to start with perhaps the only piece of good news we'll be talking about today that ringworm is not actually a worm.

Thanks for having me.

Really happy to be here.

And that is right.

It's not actually a worm. It's a pretty poorly named superficial infection of the skin, hair, nails. And the general public is probably very familiar with this infection. Other common names for it are jockage or athletes' foot. And there's probably a lot of people out there who have struggled with this.

Older estimates are that 25% of the world's population is impacted by, quote unquote, ringworm at any given time.

And that number may be higher in sort of high risk, high prevalence areas.

So now to the bad news in a sense, which is that ringworm is actually

a fungus. And let's just walk through what a typical ringworm fungal infection is like and how

it's treated. I'm a pediatrician. I certainly remember seeing many, many ringworm infections and just prescribing

a cream for it. But let's talk about the range of kind of typical infections.

So often what we see is a lot of athletes' foot and jock itch where people come in and they have

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