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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).
We might have a fighting chance against resistant bugs if pharmas did fundamental research on possible cures. But they're much happier putting out endless low-risk, high profit margin respins on aspiring, paracetamol , ibuprofen or prozac.
Also, they don't have much incentive to create one-off cures. That's why we still don't have an AIDS vaccine or an affordable cure for malaria. Selling litetime drugs is a much more attractive business proposition.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ah yes, the good old naturalist anti-science post.
I've got news for dumbasses like you. Vaccines are not like antibiotics or other antimicrobals.
If you grow a culture of bacteria or fungi in your petri dish and put an appropriate antimicrobal into it, like antibiotics or antifungals, they will kill the cultures.
If you grow a culture of bacteria or fungi or have viruses in your petri dish and you put an appropriate vaccine into there nothing of consequence happens.
Why? This is because vaccines work fundamentally different. For vaccines to work a functioning immune system is required in the first place. Only then a vaccine can work by given the immune system an example of a pathogen to prepare against for future encounters. That's the point of vaccines, they improve the immune system.
In the end it'll just be a global case of pathogen whack-a-mole as more and more diseases become resistent to the ever shrinking amount of medicines we have to combat them. When you're talking about fungi, bacteria and viruses that can evolve resistance faster than we can create new drugs to combat them the end game is obvious. Of course in the case of bacteria it could be slowed by farmers not force feeding antibiotics to livestock whether they need it or not.
I have no idea what the solution is , if there is one, but I suspect in 50 years time the days of taking pills to cure infection may well be over.
"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.
I'll believe it when I hear it from a 150 year old person.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Science is a method. You're conflating science with technology. They're not the same thing. And very few who understand the scientific method worship it blindly as a god in the same way as the religious worship their gods.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Keep your Candidian fungus in Candida please!
The X-files S04Ep11 about the fungus ridden migrant worker
Really? H2O2 is said to cause cell walls to burst in bacteria and have good antifungal properties. Thats why it provides almost immediate relief for infected teeth. Don't post stuff like this if you have no clue what you're talking about.
Clickety Click
Go to the hospital, you roll the dice. Good luck...
Hey! Don't be giving me shit over this comment. This is how they roll. May as well tell you you're on your own. The state exists to protect business!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Also, they don't have much incentive to create one-off cures. That's why we still don't have an AIDS vaccine or an affordable cure for malaria.
ORLY?
I was under the impression that we didn't have a vaccing or cure (affordable or otherwise) because these two pathogens are very hard problems.
HIV: Like the Black Plague before it, it attacks the immune system directly (via the same target!). Unlike Plague, it works slowly and uses an error-prone replication to mutate VERY rapidly, so an end-stage patient has multiple variants, with what's left of his immune system trying to whack an army of many different types of moles.
Malaria: Lives and reproduces inside red blood cells, out of reach of the immune system (except when hopping to new ones about once a month). Mature red cells dump their cellular machinery (probably to avoid cancer from the mutagenic environment), so the mechanism cells use to bring signs of internal invaders to the surface runs down. In millions of years of evolution the best mammals could come up with is a genetic bobby trap - sickle cell haemoglobin - which kills about quarter of the kids in order to make 2/3 of the survivors resistant. That being an advantageous tradeoff should also give you an idea of how nasty the bug is.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's actually both. It *is* a difficult problem, but the pharma companies are also reluctant to work on cures. They need to recoup the development expenses, and people keep complaining if too much is charged for a dose. So it's much better if you get them dependent, so they don't dare cause you to just withdraw from the market.
Both effects are well documented. It's not just one. Eliminating either would produce improved results.
That said, large numbers of companies have invested huge amounts of effort trying to cure or treat altzheimers. Some companies have gone broke doing it. So who pays for the failed attempts? It has to happen.
Yes, the system is broken. But simple fixes won't work. My thought is the development should be separated from vending into totally separate entities, but then how is the development paid for? And how are the directions for research chosen?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Have gnu, will travel.
Of course there is evolution in pathogens. The common cold and influenza are good examples here. Luckily for us humans, both of these are benign in most cases where humans have a working immune system and take some time to rest.
The main difference between our immune system and these antimicrobials is that antimicrobials can not adapt.
These are basically inanimate poisons for the pathogens, which destroy their cell membranes and or otherwise inhibit their ability to reproduce.
Our immune system however is capable of 'learning', it can adapt to new circumstances.
The problematic pathogens we are talking about here are microorganisms that generally can exist outside of a host. Microorganisms whose metabolisms are pretty flexible and they can get their energy (food) from various sources.
Now these kinds of bugs, which can replicate as long as there's food (and water) and some places that weren't sterilized thoroughly enough, are always exposed to the same kind of antagonist.
And due to their short replication cycles the likelihood of developing a resistance against that particular antagonist is increased.
This makes the overuse of these antimicrobials concerning, while disinfecting hospital equipment or hospital space in general, when doctors prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for things like inflamed throats because colds or flus (which are caused by viruses), when livestock is unnecessarily fed antibiotics and so forth.
When it comes vaccines you can think of it this way: Pathogens will enter in the human body no matter what.
Strengthening the hosts natural immune responses does reduce the time frame in which they can mutate inside a host.
It also reduces the time frame during which the host may infect other hosts.
Hypothetically a super bug could emerge here as well, we should not deny this possibility. For example if a host was constantly exposed to a significant enough external supply of these pathogens, this may be a plausible scenario.
The big question would be if we're artificially speeding up that evolution with vaccination like with the overuse of antimicrobials or not.
Fortunately empirical evidence with cases like polio or small pox support the assumption that pathogens don't fare as well against a vaccinated adaptive immune system than against these 'static' antimicrobials.