Candida Auris: A fungus that's killing the world quietly

A deadly, drug-resistant fungus is infecting patients in hospitals and nursing homes around the world. The fungus seems to have emerged in several locations at once, not from a single source. The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe. 

Risk of Candida Auris

Typically, Candida auris infections occur after a patient has been in a healthcare facility for several weeks, according to a report. The most commonly reported infections have been in wounds, bloodstreams, and ears. Doctors have found the fungus in people's urine and respiratory tracts, but it is unclear whether the fungus just hangs out in those places without causing trouble. For now, if your immune system is strong, your chances of getting a life-threatening Candida auris infection are very low. Risk goes up if you have a chronic disease like diabetes mellitus or have had recent surgery, recent antibiotic treatment, or a central venous catheter.

Unbeatable

An epidemiologist, said she now saw C. auris as 'the top' threat among resistant infections. "It’s pretty much unbeatable and difficult to identify," she said.
Nearly half of patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days, according to the C.D.C. Yet the world’s experts have not nailed down where it came from in the first place.

What are the symptoms

The symptoms — fever, aches and fatigue — are seemingly ordinary, but when a person gets infected, particularly someone already unhealthy, such commonplace symptoms can be fatal.
The earliest known case in the United States involved a woman who arrived at a hospital on May 6, 2013, seeking care for respiratory failure. She was 61 and from the United Arab Emirates, and she died a week later, after testing positive for the fungus.

Where did it come from?

The first time doctors encountered C. auris was in the ear of a woman in Japan in 2009 (auris is Latin for ear). It seemed innocuous at the time, a cousin of common, easily treated fungal infections.
Three years later, it appeared in an unusual test result in the lab of  a microbiologist in Netherlands, who was analysing a bloodstream infection in 18 patients from four hospitals in India. Soon, new clusters of C. auris seemed to emerge with each passing month in different parts of the world.
The C.D.C. investigators theorized that C. auris started in Asia and spread across the globe. But when the agency compared the entire genome of auris samples from India and Pakistan, Venezuela, South Africa and Japan, it found that its origin was not a single place, and there was not a single auris strain.

Drug resistant fungus

Simply put, fungi, just like bacteria, are evolving defenses to survive modern medicines.
For decades, public health experts have warned that the overuse of antibiotics was reducing the effectiveness of drugs that have lengthened life spans by curing bacterial infections once commonly fatal. But lately, there has been an explosion of resistant fungi as well, adding a new and frightening dimension to a phenomenon that is undermining a pillar of modern medicine.

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