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Deadly Drug-Resistant Fungus Is 'Quietly Spreading Across the Globe' (msn.com)
A drug-resistant fungus called Candida auris "is quietly spreading across the globe," reports the New York Times:
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 (CDC) to add it to a list of germs deemed "urgent threats...."
In the United States, two million people contract resistant infections annually, and 23,000 die from them, according to the official CDC estimate. That number was based on 2010 figures; more recent estimates from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine put the death toll at 162,000. Worldwide fatalities from resistant infections are estimated at 700,000.... With bacteria and fungi alike, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs.
Even the CDC, under its agreement with states, is not allowed to make public the location or name of hospitals involved in outbreaks. State governments have in many cases declined to publicly share information beyond acknowledging that they have had cases.... [A] hushed panic is playing out in hospitals around the world. Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients -- or prospective ones.
The Times reports that C. auris targets people with weakened immune systems (including babies and the elderly) -- and that 587 cases of C. auris have already been reported in the U.S., according to the CDC: 309 cases in New York, 104 in New Jersey, and 144 in Illinois. The CDC adds that half the patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days.
It also survived in a room treated for an entire week with aerosolized hydrogen peroxide, according to the Times. "Simply put, fungi, just like bacteria, are evolving defenses to survive modern medicines."
The New York Post adds that "Given the speed at which the inspection spreads, coupled with its resistance to medication, 'the prospect of an endemic or epidemic multidrug-resistant yeast in U.S. healthcare facilities is troubling,' the CDC said in October."
In the United States, two million people contract resistant infections annually, and 23,000 die from them, according to the official CDC estimate. That number was based on 2010 figures; more recent estimates from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine put the death toll at 162,000. Worldwide fatalities from resistant infections are estimated at 700,000.... With bacteria and fungi alike, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs.
Even the CDC, under its agreement with states, is not allowed to make public the location or name of hospitals involved in outbreaks. State governments have in many cases declined to publicly share information beyond acknowledging that they have had cases.... [A] hushed panic is playing out in hospitals around the world. Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients -- or prospective ones.
The Times reports that C. auris targets people with weakened immune systems (including babies and the elderly) -- and that 587 cases of C. auris have already been reported in the U.S., according to the CDC: 309 cases in New York, 104 in New Jersey, and 144 in Illinois. The CDC adds that half the patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days.
It also survived in a room treated for an entire week with aerosolized hydrogen peroxide, according to the Times. "Simply put, fungi, just like bacteria, are evolving defenses to survive modern medicines."
The New York Post adds that "Given the speed at which the inspection spreads, coupled with its resistance to medication, 'the prospect of an endemic or epidemic multidrug-resistant yeast in U.S. healthcare facilities is troubling,' the CDC said in October."
Modern medicine and scientific approaches to medicine focus on a pathogen and it's specific cure. The discovery of a pathogen and how to kill it and prevent it's spread probably sparked this paradigm (Louis Pasteur & Rabies), which was reinforced by Koch's Postulates surrounding tuberculosis and anthrax, and cemented by Fleming's discovery of penicillin. This is outlined brilliantly in the book "Microbe Hunters" by Paul de Kruif.
Now we are discovering that we live in a massively interconnected biological system, and we are playing whack-a-mole. Also, should climate change actually warm things up a bit, I suspect we'll discover all sorts of new breeding grounds for microorganisms that won't play well with us.
Sadly, it may be required that we re-engineer much more than greenhouse gasses to preserve our concept of a modern society. Humans have significantly changed many aspects of habitats around the globe, which may cause the evolutionary behavior known as Punctuated Equilibrium to create biological changes faster than we can keep up.
We might want to worry less about losing our job to AI, and start utilizing AI, along with whatever innate intelligence we may think we have, to survive, period.
Evolution is a tough bitch, and Gaia eats her young, and we may have just given her a new condiment.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
... hospitals suffering from outbreaks post about it in the newspaper and quarantine themselves. Then again, our hospitals don't have to worry about marketing either (shudder).
"With bacteria and fungi alike, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs."
Uh, they're "reluctant"?
if you have an outbreak in a particular area, then you fucking are an infection hub. Mandatory disclosure for shit like this should be the bare minimum to remove the ethical excuses and help prevent irrational decisions from perpetuating an outbreak.
And you're going to tell me we simply cannot use the Data here? Forget humans realizing there's an outbreak going on; we should have machines learning and alerting on this as they crawl through our electronic medical record systems all day. Yes, we likely know how fractured medical data warehouses still are, but could still likely be done at the major/regional hospital level that all run the same medical systems.
Put a few marketing dollars behind it, and you could likely get that data for free by crowd sourcing it. Perhaps voluntary disclosure of symptoms/illnesses in real time from the masses is a way to stay in front of an outbreak in a particular area. Of course, you would also have to validate those claims in some way, otherwise just like everything else crowd-enabled, it risks being abused to distort the truth.
"Simply put, fungi, just like bacteria, are evolving defenses to survive modern medicines."
Yeah, or one could peek back at history and consider this particular evolution could have been man-made as well. Stranger things have happened.