Posted on 04/07/2019 11:04:03 AM PDT by blam
Last May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious. Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit.
The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe. Over the last five years, it has hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a prestigious British medical center to shut down its intensive care unit, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa.
Recently C. auris reached New York, New Jersey and Illinois, leading the federal Centers for Disease Control 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 hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”
C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Candida auris is a species of fungus first described in 2009, which grows as yeast. It is one of the few species of the genus Candida which cause candidiasis in humans. Often, Candidiasis is acquired in hospitals by patients with weakened immune systems. C. auris can cause invasive candidiasis in which the bloodstream (fungemia), the central nervous system, and internal organs are infected. It has recently attracted increased attention because of its multiple drug resistance. Treatment is also complicated because it is easily misidentified as other Candida species. C. auris was first described after it was isolated from the ear canal of a 70-year-old Japanese woman at the Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital in Japan in 2009. The first cases of disease-causing C. auris were reported from South Korea in 2011, spread across Asia and Europe, and first appeared in the U.S. in 2013.DNA analysis of four distinct but drug-resistant strains of Candida auris indicate an evolutionary divergence taking place at least 4,000 years ago, with a common leap among the four varieties into drug-resistance possibly linked to widespread azole-type antifungal use in agriculture.
Yes. It always is.
There’s a fungus amungus. And, cue the Tony Orlando and Dawn. ;^)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3740134/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/candidaauris/index
Spells MOON.
First you start the rumor.
Then you ‘assign’ certain deaths to it.
Then you widen the net.
Once the net widened and panic sets in, ‘modern medicine’ will come up with an ‘experimental drug’ that know one can have until ????
Make drug available at humungous cost in US and pennies in Mexico.
Almost like saying EVERYONE that ate beans in the Civil War died.
There is fungus...among us.
Ah yes. Another Disease of the Month report. Did anyone notice that it occurs in immunodeficient individuals? What a surprise! /sarc
I guess UV light used in water filtration will kill everything in the water.
Don’t forget the BBQ and cold beer.
Celebrate Going Global!!
I’m glass the SAPP’s noted it’s already been posted. Let’s keep this stuff out of the public eye! Hooray!
I got Thrush from my inhaler.
The doc wanted to put me on meds. I went home and used vinegar and got rid of it. Told the doc the next week I saw him and he said he will recommend that to everyone on those steroid inhalers.
GD rotten medications these days..its either take them or suffer from lack of breath.
I’ve run across UV light in hand-dryers in the bathroom.
Pretty cool. I suppose.
It was a blade hand-dryer (I think maybe it’s called that).
Place for your hands with 2 blasts of air (and UV light) in opposite directions.
My guess is you are not toking on home-grown treated with pesticides and anti-fungal chemicals! Ha ha.
I had lesions in my throat. Never smoked a cigarette. My last “toke” was 1984. The only thing the doc could figure was that my blood sugar was too high and it was “splashing” out of my stomach. My A1c was an 8. A little high, but not crazy high.
10 days of anitibiotics and I was good as new.
C. auris was first described after it was isolated from the ear canal of a 70-year-old Japanese woman at the Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital in Japan.[1] It was isolated based on its ability to grow in the presence of the fungicide micafungin, an echinocandin class fungicide.[1] Phenotypic, chemotaxonomic and phylogenetic analyses established C. auris as a new strain of the genus Candida.[1][17]
The first three cases of disease-causing C. auris were reported from South Korea in 2011.[18] Two isolates had been obtained during a 2009 study and a third was discovered in a stored sample from 1996.[18] All three cases had persistent fungemia, i.e. bloodstream infection, and two of the patients subsequently died due to complications.[18] Notably, the isolates initially were misidentified as Candida haemulonii and Rhodotorula glutinis using standard methods, until sequence analysis correctly identified them as C. auris.[18] These first cases emphasize the importance of accurate species identification and timely application of the correct antifungal for the effective treatment of candidiasis with C. auris.[18]
During 2009–2011, 12 C. auris isolates were obtained from patients at two hospitals in Delhi, India.[19] The same genotype was found in distinct settings: intensive care, surgical, medical, oncologic, neonatal, and pediatric wards, which were mutually exclusive with respect to health care personnel.[19] Most had persistent candidemia and a high mortality rate was observed.[19] All isolates were of the same clonal strain, however, and were only identified positively by DNA sequence analysis.[19] As previously, the strain was misidentified with established diagnostic laboratory tests.[19] The Indian researchers wrote in 2013 that C. auris was much more prevalent than published reports indicate since most diagnostic laboratories do not use sequence-based methods for strain identification.[19]
The fungus spread to other continents and eventually, a multi-drug-resistant strain was discovered in Southeast Asian countries in early 2016.[20]
The first report of a C. auris outbreak in Europe was an October 2016 in Royal Brompton Hospital, a London cardio-thoracic hospital.[15] In April 2017, CDC director Anne Schuchat named it a “catastrophic threat”.[21] As of May 2017 the CDC had reported 77 cases in the United States on its website. Of these, 69 were from samples collected in New York and New Jersey.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_auris#History
However, it is a line-of-sight method whereas fungal spores are often air-borne and may become completely hidden.
Well, crap.
Nope. Never used the crap. Had enough lung problems through my life without doing that.
Antibiotics dont work for fungal infections-at least that was what I was told.
Thanks for that very interesting info, and the link.
The CDC has done genetic sequencing on this fungus. There are several independent strains genetically different enough to indicate that there are several sources. The US strain seems to be from either India/Pakistan or Venezuela. Search for C. auris on the CDC site for more info.
Thanks.
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