Nearly three dozen people in the United
States have been diagnosed with a deadly and highly drug-resistant fungal
infection since federal health officials first warned U.S.
clinicians last June to be on the lookout for the emerging pathogen
that has been spreading around the world.
The fungus, a strain of a kind of yeast known
as Candida auris, has been reported
in a dozen countries on five continents starting in 2009, when it was found in
an ear infection in a patient in Japan. Since then, the fungus has been
reported in Colombia, India, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, South Korea, Venezuela
and the United Kingdom.
Unlike garden variety yeast infections, this
one causes serious bloodstream infections, spreads easily from person to person
in health-care settings, and survives for months on skin and for weeks on bed
rails, chairs and other hospital equipment. Some
strains are resistant to all three major classes of antifungal drugs. Based on
information from a limited number of patients, up to 60 percent of people with
these infection have died. Many of them also had other serious underlying
illnesses.
Those at greatest risk are individuals who
have been in intensive care for a long time or who are on ventilators or
have central line catheters inserted into a large vein.
In the United States, the largest number of
infections has been reported in New York, with at least 28 cases, according to
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infections have also been
reported in Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Last June, the
CDC sent an urgent alert to clinicians to start looking for the infections,
which are difficult to identify with standard laboratory methods.
“As soon as
we put out that alert, we started to get information about cases and now we
know more about how it spreads and how it’s acting,” Tom Chiller, the CDC’s top
fungal expert, said in an interview Thursday. The CDC now tracks the number of
infections, updating the case count every few weeks.
In addition to the 35 infected patients, an
additional 18 were carrying the organism but weren't sickened by it.
The microbe is among a group of newly
emerging drug-resistant threats, health officials said.
“These pathogens are increasing, they’re new,
they’re scary and they’re very difficult to combat,” said Anne Schuchat, CDC’s
acting director, during a briefing in Washington this week about the growing
danger from antimicrobial
resistance. Read more here
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