Nearly three-dozen people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with a deadly and highly drug-resistant fungal infection since last June. The pathogen, a strain of yeast known as Candida auris, has been reported in 12 countries since 2009.
The first infection was in a patient in Japan, but the fungus has been reported in Colombia, India, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, South Korea, Venezuela and the United Kingdom.
Unlike the usual yeast infection, this one causes serious bloodstream infections, spreads easily from person to person in health-care settings, and survives for months on the skin and for weeks on bed rails, chairs and other hospital equipment. Some strains are resistant to all three major classes of antifungal drugs. Nearly 60 percent of people with these infections have died, particularly those with serious underlying illnesses.
The microbe is among a group of newly emerging drug-resistant threats, health officials said. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out an alert last June.
“As soon as we put out that alert, we started to get information about cases and now we know more about how it spreads and how it’s acting,” Tom Chiller, the CDC’s top fungal expert, said in an interview Thursday.
“These pathogens are increasing, they’re new, they’re scary and they’re very difficult to combat,” said Anne Schuchat, CDC’s acting director, during a briefing in Washington.
The infection is still relatively rare. “It’s really hitting the sickest of the sick,” Chiller said. In other countries, infections have been resistant to all three major types of antifungal drugs, but so far the U.S. cases have been treatable with existing drugs. Most yeast infections don’t raise the kind of alarm bells that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria do – until now.
“This is a paradigm shift, because Candida is not generally thought of as highly resistant or passed person to person,” said Chiller.
Jesus predicted that serious pestilences would arise in the last days (See Matthew 24:7). Through the prophet and psalmist, He also said that those who are under the shadow of the Almighty will not be afraid “of the pestilence that walketh in darkness” (See Psalm 91:6).
“War, and rumors of war, sword, famine, and pestilence are first to shake the powers of earth, then the voice of God will shake the sun, moon, and stars, and this earth also. I saw that the shaking of the powers in Europe is not, as some teach, the shaking of the powers of heaven, but it is the shaking of the angry nations.” { CET 111.2 }