A deadly, drug-resistant yeast infection is spreading around the world

[Guest Nicole]

U.S. health officials are warning hundreds of thousands of clinicians in hospitals around the country to be on the lookout for an emerging and highly drug-resistant type of yeast that is causing potentially fatal infections in hospitalized patients around the world.

Most people are familiar with the garden variety kind of yeast infections that people get on the skin or in their genitals. But invasive yeast infections can be fatal, especially for patients in intensive care or having surgery. Others at risk include people with diabetes, patients taking powerful antibiotics and antifungal medications, and those with catheters.

This emerging strain of yeast, known as Candida auris, has triggered outbreaks in health-care settings, causing bloodstream, wound and ear infections. Since 2009, the pathogen has been found in nine countries on four continents, including one possible infection in the United States in 2013.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a clinical alert late last week to U.S. health-care facilities and dozens of medical societies to share with their members.

“CDC is concerned that C. auris will emerge in new locations, including the United States,” the alert said. The infections have most commonly been acquired in hospitals and occurred several weeks into a patient's hospital stay.

Officials warn that the yeast doesn’t respond to common antifungal drugs and is difficult to identify with standard laboratory methods.

“What concerned us is that it is potentially resistant to one or two, if not all three” main classes of antifungal drugs used to treat these infections, said Tom Chiller, the CDC’s top fungus expert, in an interview Tuesday.

Invasive infections with any type of Candida can be fatal. Based on information from a limited number of patients, 60 percent of people with this new type of Candida infection have died, but it’s not clear how many of them had other serious illnesses that also increased their risk of death.

Most hospital labs in the United States also don’t have the capacity to identify the new strain because it can be confused with other more common types of yeast. As a result, misidentification could lead to inappropriate treatment, he said.

That’s particularly important with this organism because the limited data so far suggests that the infections have occurred primarily in patients who were already in the hospital for other reasons. Unlike other types of yeast that typically spread from person to person, “this one seems to get into hospital settings and stay there,” Chiller said, and may spread from contact with the environment, such as contaminated surfaces or equipment.

The organism was first identified in 2009 in Japan from a patient’s external ear discharge. Infections have also occurred in South Korea, India, South Africa, Kuwait, Pakistan, Colombia, Venezuela and the United Kingdom. Because identification requires specialized laboratory methods, the CDC alert said infections likely occurred in other countries but have not been identified or reported.

Based on a review of specimens collected in the past, CDC officials said they are aware of one possible infection in the United States in 2013 that was collected by a private lab. The CDC has tested a small sample ofCandida specimens over the last eight years, and so far the deadly new yeast has not turned up. But the testing is limited, he said — there’s surveillance at only four sites in the country, and only about 7,000 samples have been analyzed.

The CDC is recommending that hospitals and other health-care facilities that suspect they have a patient with such an infection contact local public health authorizes and the CDC. They also recommend that patients carrying or infected with this organism have their own rooms, and that their rooms are thoroughly cleaned and disinfected every day with an EPA-registered, hospital-grade disinfectant that targets fungus.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/06/29/a-deadly-drug-resistant-yeast-infection-is-spreading-around-the-world/

[admin]

This is getting worse.

Just saw another report yesterday.

@Indiana

[Guest Indiana]

😞

[Space Merchant]

Reasons why people have to always keep an eye on the farming institutions and the big pharma companies. It will be only a matter of time until the MSM and gov't take advantage of such and mold into a fear mongering tactic and the push to continue to pill the people to build up currency.

 

 

[LNN]

Superbug may be spreading in hospitals overrun with COVID-19

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/10/drug-resistant-superbug-candida-auris-thriving-hospitals-coronavirus-era/

“The doctor asked me to take a look … I thought, how bad can it be?” recalls Rhodes, an infectious disease expert at Imperial College London who studies antifungal resistance. Rhodes stepped in to help one of the world’s top cardiology hospitals identify the pathogen and clear it from the premises. The germ was Candida auris, little known at the time. What she saw stunned her: “You think COVID-19 is bad until you see Candida auris***.”***

 

Moreover patients who have tubes that go into their body, such as catheters or ones for breathing or feeding, are at the highest risk for C. auris infections, and these invasive procedures have become more common because of the respiratory failure associated with COVID-19.

[LNN]

The superbug is a yeast that can infect the ears and open wounds, and it can also enter the bloodstream to trigger severe infection throughout the body, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The yeast clings to surfaces and spreads easily in health care settings, especially among patients with catheters or other tubes that enter their bodies.

Hospitals were keeping quiet about it as to not scare away patients for elective procedures