If this mysterious and terrifying fungus has paved its way, blame it on overusing of antibiotics and pesticides.
According to The New York Times, Candida auris (C. auris) is a fungus that has been causing deaths across the globe, which is nearly impossible to remove it from infected patients’ hospital rooms as well as equipment.
The fungus can remain on the patient’s skin and objects such as equipment and hospital furniture for longer periods. Therefore, it can spread indirectly from patient to patient. If the fungus invades your body, it can kill you if you have a poor or weak immune system.
The characteristic clinical features of C. auris are fever, aches, and fatigue; however, but in patients with poor immune systems, babies, and the elderly, the infection could be fatal.
A man who was tested positive for C. auris after undergoing abdominal surgery died after 90 days in the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital. However, it has been found that the room in which he lived had traces of C. auris even after extensive cleaning.
President of the hospital Dr. Scott Lorin said, “The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.”
He added, “Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump. The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”
The Times has reported that the fungal infection is quite difficult to treat because it is one of the myriad microbes, which has become resistant to drugs due to over-prescription. Experts suspect pesticides might also play a pivotal role, because azole fungicides that are used in soil have “created an environment so hostile that the fungi are evolving, with resistant strains surviving.”
C. auris has also hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela. It forced one hospital in the United Kingdom to shut down its entire I.C.U. for more than 10 days. It also caused an outbreak at a hospital in Spain. Furthermore, the fungal infection has been reported in Asia, South Africa, India, and Pakistan.
In the United States, so far, there have been 587 cases reported (309 in New York, 104 in New Jersey, and 144 in Illinois).
The CDC has reported that nearly 50 percent of residents in some Chicago nursing homes have been tested positive for C. auris, which can grow anywhere, including ventilators and I.V. lines.
And hospitals that are wary of getting reputations as fungi-infested houses do not reveal outbreaks for years until the infection is under control.
In the United States, the CDC does not disclose the names and locations of hospitals dealing with such outbreaks so many states admit that they have had the outbreak without saying where. Dr. Tom Chiller, head of the fungal branch at the CDC, said, “It is a creature from the black lagoon, which is spearheading a global detective effort to find treatments and stop the spread. It bubbled up and now it is everywhere.” He explained that the fungus would most likely come to rule the earth.
