The Desperate Race to Neutralize a Lethal Superbug Yeast
WIRED
JUAN GAERTNER/SCIENCE SOURCE
August 13,2019
Candida auris, the potentially deadly “superbug yeast” that has alarmed health authorities around the world...as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detailed in a recent case report. That super-yeast has wreaked havoc...where it has spread explosively in hospitals, infecting surgical wounds, brewing whole-body bloodstream infections, and clinging to every surface that investigators have thought to check...Worst of all, the super-yeast emerged already resistant to the limited drugs available to treat fungal infections...there have been more than 700 cases in the US. C. auris has been diagnosed in patients in more than 30 countries on six continents, and when investigators talk about it, they use ominous phrases such as “pandemic potential.”
C. auris...was suddenly simply present, in multiple places at once.The most provocative hypothesis for the emergence of C. auris, however, is also the most discouraging, because it traces the yeast’s emergence to a problem that humans have been unwilling to control. In this telling, captured in another paper published last month, the super-yeast is a disease of the Anthropocene. It is flourishing because human-caused climate change has given it a boost.
That thinking goes like this: There are possibly millions of species of fungi in the world, yet relatively few of them succeed in attacking humans. What protects us from them is our warmth: At 37 degrees Celsius (or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit), we are hotter than what most fungi can survive. But if something encouraged fungi to tolerate higher temperatures, more of them could become a threat to us—and the slow heating of the planet may be creating the perfect laboratory in which fungi can adapt. “There is no better explanation for the simultaneous emergence of Candida auris than that, with the globe warming, some strains have adapted and are now able to survive in humans,” says Arturo Casadevall, one of the paper’s authors, who is a physician and the chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
I can’t do this article justice. Read the whole story here.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-desperate-race-to-neutralize-a-lethal-superbug-yeast/?verso=true
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