The scary new ‘superbug’ no one’s telling you about

Last spring, a young woman went to visit her 72-year-old father in a New York City hospital. He was recovering from complications following a recent surgery.

She found her father sitting in his chair, in soiled pants. When he’d called for help to get to the bathroom, no one had responded.

The hospital staff were afraid to touch him. A test had shown he was carrying a fungal infection.

But not just any fungal infection.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have recently added this fungus to their list of germs known as “urgent threats.”

Last spring, another elderly man in New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital was found to have this fungal infection. He died after 90 days.

But the fungal infection lived on.

It was detected on every surface of his room: the walls, bed, door, curtains, phone, sink, whiteboard. Ceiling and floor tiles were ripped out in order to get rid of it.

So, why is no one talking about this?

Candida auris: A fungus resistant to drugs

By now you’re surely familiar with the worldwide health crisis known as antibiotic resistance.

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that 23,000 people were dying annually from infections caused by MRSA and other “unkillable” bacteria that have learned to resist our best antibiotics. More recent estimates put that figure at 162,000.

Now we’re finding that fungal infections are following suit, and it’s downright scary.

Candida auris, or c. auris for short, is a fungus that was first discovered in Japan in 2009. Since then, it has spread to countries around the world, unchecked by the best antifungal drugs available.

The CDC tells us that more than 90 percent of C. auris infections are resistant to at least one such drug, while 30 percent are resistant to two or more major drugs. This is part of what makes C. auris so dangerous.

It poses a unique threat for other reasons as well:

• Once this fungus gets into the bloodstream, it can cause dangerous and even life-threatening infections.
• It can live on, even after the person it infected has died.
• It spreads at an amazingly rapid pace and is almost impossible to eradicate from surfaces it infects.

“It is a creature from the black lagoon,” said Dr. Tom Chiller. “It bubbled up and now it is everywhere.”

Dr. Chiller heads the fungal branch at the C.D.C., where he and his team are leading a worldwide effort to find treatments for C. auris and stop its spread.

So, why is no one talking about this?

Keeping the secret

People with compromised immune systems, including the elderly and those who are already ill, are most susceptible to C. auris infections.

You’d expect that hospitals and nursing homes would be going out of their way to let patients and their families know about this new threat and teach them how to protect themselves.

Quite the contrary.

Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, found that the entire subject is cloaked in secrecy.

Hospitals and nursing homes were unwilling to talk with him about the topic, even in non-specific terms.

Connecticut state officials wouldn’t tell him the name of a hospital where a patient had C. auris. Neither would officials in Texas, where the woman was transferred and later died.

“We came to realize that the secrecy surrounding C. auris was a big part of the story,” Richtel wrote.

Doctors from as far away as Spain and England wrote to say that they didn’t want their hospital to get bad press by appearing to be a “hotbed” for the fungus.

A New York doctor said that his patients didn’t want to be identified, fearing they’d be wearing the “scarlet letter” of A for auris.

How to protect yourself

Fever, aches, and fatigue are the symptoms of a C. auris infection. Of course, these symptoms could indicate many other illnesses as well, so it can be difficult to identify.

Fortunately, if you are a healthy individual, your risk of infection is low.

If you or a loved one are in a hospital or nursing home, you can ask if there have been cases of C. auris there. If there have, you should ask that more stringent infection control precautions are taken.

The facility should be placing infected patients in single rooms. The CDC also recommends using hospital-grade cleansers that are effective against C. difficile bacteria.

New York, New Jersey, Illinois and specifically Chicago are the places in the United States where the c. auris fungus has been concentrated.

And of course, you can never wash your hands too much.

Sources:

1. A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy — The New York Times
2. Candida Auris: The Fungus Nobody Wants to Talk About — The New York Times
3. What You Need to Know About Candida Auris — The New York Times
4. Worldwide emergence of resistance to antifungal drugs challenges human health and food security — Science
5. Re-estimating annual deaths due to multidrug-resistant organism infections — Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology
6. The Deadly Yeast Infection You Must Know About — Consumer Reports