Deadly germs, Lost cures: A Mysterious Infection Spanning the Globe in (snip) Secrecy

The New York Times ^ | 6 April 2019 | Matt Richtel and Adrew Jacobs

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

Last May, a elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed he was infected with a newly discovered germ. Doctors isolated him in ICU. Over the last five years, it has hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a British medical center to shut down its ICU, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa.

Recently C. auris reached New York, NJ and Illinois, leading the federal CDC and Prevention to add it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.” 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.

“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

In 2015, Dr. Johanna Rhodes, an infectious disease expert at Imperial College London, got a panicked call from the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. C. auris had taken root there, and the hospital couldn’t clear it.

Under her direction, hospital workers used a special device to spray aerosolized hydrogen peroxide around a room used for a patient with C. auris. They left the device going for a week. Then they put a “settle plate” in the middle of the room with a gel at the bottom that would serve as a place for any surviving microbes to grow, Dr. Rhodes said.

Only one organism grew back. C. auris.

[tired&retired]

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1439-making-a-case-for-the-5th-kingdom

Making a case for the 5th kingdom

[bert]

———Making a case for the 5 kingdoms——

Kingdoms:
1. Plants
2. Animals
3. Fungi
4. ?
5. ?

For the record, for many years the largest creature on earth in terms of size and biomass was the Humongeous fungus in Michigan.

[tired&retired]

The Linnean model came from Thomas Whittaker. In 1969 Whittaker proposed a “five kingdom” system in which three kingdoms were added to the animals and plants: Monera (bacteria), Protista, and Fungi.

[bert]

Thanks for that

[redgolum]

Doesn’t fit the agenda.

And to be honest, how many antifugals are we using on crops? We use some on seeds, but not on finished crops.

But then Nebraska isn’t a huge test case for such things.

[mdmathis6]

While there might be some truth to it, I think pork producers are trying to get the price up...the same way a small reported isolated refinery fire always jacks up gas prices nation wide. The Chinese are also invested heavily in American pork production...the Smithfield company for example.