Georgia, 22 March 2023 (GNP): The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Monday that a highly infectious and drug-resistant fungus is proliferating at “an alarming rate” in US long-term care hospitals and other medical centers.
According to CDC statistics, the number of fungal infections caused by the Candida Auris yeast strain increased from 476 in 2019 to 1,471 in 2021.
In the same time frame, the number of cases when a person has the fungus but is not afflicted nearly tripled from 1,077 to 4,040.
According to preliminary figures, the numbers have probably continued to elevate.
Infection was initially identified in the US in 2016. According to CDC data that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the most notable boost in cases occurred between 2020 and 2021.
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Healthy people are not susceptible to Candida Auris, but those with weakened immune systems or those utilizing medical equipment like ventilators or catheters might develop severe sickness or pass away.
The fungus may trigger outbreaks because it persists on surfaces and spreads through contact with patients and contaminated objects, according to CDC specialists, who say the growing dissemination stresses the need for effective infection control strategies.
According to William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s infectious diseases department, If the fungus enters a hospital, it will be incredibly challenging to contain them and get them out.
“They can persist, smoldering, causing infections for a considerable period of time despite the best efforts of the infection control team and everyone else in the hospital”, he said.
According to Meghan Lyman, a CDC medical officer, and the paper’s main author describing the fungus’s spread, thorough cleaning of hospitals is difficult due to how long the fungus survives on surfaces.
She said that several disinfectants frequently used in healthcare settings are ineffective against this fungus.
The vast majority of examined patients were resistant to anti-fungal therapy. Subsequently, The CDC has referred to it as an “urgent antimicrobial resistance threat”
Dr. Meghan Lyman stated that one in three patients with invasive infections dies, although it can be challenging to determine exactly what part Candida Auris played in feeble patients.
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More than half of the states have already confirmed the presence of the fungus, with 17 states reporting their first cases between 2019 and 2021.
According to the CDC, the majority of the spread has taken place in long-term acute care hospitals and skilled nursing centers, where patients are more likely to use ventilators.
As screening needs specialized equipment and is carried out inconsistently across the United States, case counts are likely underestimated.
Infections in the blood, heart, and brain from candida can be lethal.
As the patients who pose the greatest risk of dying are already struggling for their lives, it can be challenging to identify the cause of death, and the CDC does not keep a record of how many patients expire.
One popular theory claims that Candida is now able to endure the warmth of the human body because it has mutated to exist in a warming environment, whereas fungi are usually unable to.
Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied the fungus stated, “This is how climate change or global warming can bring diseases because those in the environment have to adapt to survive and then have the capacity to survive in humans”.
