“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump ... the mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

POSTED BY: rue
UPDATED: Monday, April 8, 2019 00:16
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RUE

Sunday, April 7, 2019 5:40 AM

Dr. Lynn Sosa, Connecticut’s deputy state epidemiologist, said she now saw C. auris as “the top” threat among resistant infections. “It’s pretty much unbeatable and difficult to identity,” she said.

Deadly germs, Lost cures

A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy

By Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs
April 6, 2019

Last May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious. Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit.

The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe. 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 to add it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.”
"Somehow, it made a jump almost seemingly simultaneously, and seemed to spread and it is drug resistant, which is really mind-boggling," said Dr. Snigdha Vallabhaneni, a fungal expert and epidemiologist at the C.D.C.

The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.

“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.

For decades, public health experts have warned that the overuse of antibiotics was reducing the effectiveness of drugs that have lengthened life spans by curing bacterial infections once commonly fatal. But lately, there has been an explosion of resistant fungi as well, adding a new and frightening dimension to a phenomenon that is undermining a pillar of modern medicine.

“It’s an enormous problem,” said Matthew Fisher, a professor of fungal epidemiology at Imperial College London, who was a co-author of a recent scientific review on the rise of resistant fungi. “We depend on being able to treat those patients with antifungals.”

Simply put, fungi, just like bacteria, are evolving defenses to survive modern medicines.

Yet even as world health leaders have pleaded for more restraint in prescribing antimicrobial drugs to combat bacteria and fungi — convening the United Nations General Assembly in 2016 to manage an emerging crisis — gluttonous overuse of them in hospitals, clinics and farming has continued.

Resistant germs are often called “superbugs,” but this is simplistic because they don’t typically kill everyone. Instead, they are most lethal to people with immature or compromised immune systems, including newborns and the elderly, smokers, diabetics and people with autoimmune disorders who take steroids that suppress the body’s defenses.

Scientists say that unless more effective new medicines are developed and unnecessary use of antimicrobial drugs is sharply curbed, risk will spread to healthier populations. A study the British government funded projects that if policies are not put in place to slow the rise of drug resistance, 10 million people could die worldwide of all such infections in 2050, eclipsing the eight million expected to die that year from cancer.

Dr. Johanna Rhodes, an infectious di

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Sunday, April 7, 2019 8:43 AM

Nytimes?
They never peddle anything except Fake News, right?

RUE

Sunday, April 7, 2019 8:49 AM

This happens to be an area of professional knowledge, and something I've been following over the years. So while I can't vouch for the statistics or the stories of particular instances, I'm personally assured this is valid. Your mileage may vary!

But that doesn't mean the paper isn't (still) being a shill for the deep state. Only THEY know what important stories we HAVEN'T seen today!

SIGNYM

Sunday, April 7, 2019 11:46 AM

yeeks. another good reason to stay out of hospitals. I wondered whether C auris was susceptible to UV light (say, for sterilizing a room) and found this ...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315476207_UV_Susceptibility_o
f_the_Emerging_Pathogen_Candida_auris

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

RUE

Sunday, April 7, 2019 12:49 PM

UV has a couple of fatal flaws and one of them is shadow, though for airborne infections it makes a reasonable disinfectant as long as you keep dust from building up on the lamps. I remember being young and seeing units on the inside of every room, above the door.

Another problem is the way hospitals are now built. A number of decades ago hospitals changed their mission from treating patients to making money. To do that they had to attract not-very-sick short-term patients they could cycle through quickly. To do that they had to change their structure and make it more homey and inviting. They replaced cold tiles, sheet linoleum, hard plaster ceilings, minimal metal bedframes, and expensive brass doorknobs and fixtures, and so on; with wallboard, vinyl tiles, dropped acoustic ceilings, plush complicated beds, and cheap brushed aluminum metal - not to mention heavy drapes on the widows, particleboard tray-tables and closet partitions, plush chairs, and so on - all of which are very difficult to clean and have no natural anti-fungal, anti-biotic properties. Even ICUs aren't built with cleaning in mind.

And as mentioned in the article there's the for-profit over-use of azoles; where the profitability of anything becomes the sole criteria on which it's judged - and god forbid anyone interfere with that.

RUE

Sunday, April 7, 2019 12:50 PM

UV has a couple of fatal flaws and one of them is shadow, though for airborne infections it makes a reasonable disinfectant as long as you keep dust from building up on the lamps. I remember being young and seeing units on the inside of every hospital room, above the door.

Another problem is the way hospitals are now built. A number of decades ago hospitals changed their mission from treating patients to making money. To do that they had to attract not-very-sick short-term patients they could cycle through quickly. To do that they had to change their structure and make it more homey and inviting. They replaced cold tiles, sheet linoleum, hard plaster ceilings, minimal metal bedframes, and expensive brass doorknobs and fixtures, and so on; with wallboard, vinyl tiles, dropped acoustic ceilings, plush complicated beds, and cheap brushed aluminum metal - not to mention heavy drapes on the widows, particleboard tray-tables and closet partitions, plush chairs, and so on - all of which are very difficult to clean and have no natural anti-fungal, anti-biotic properties. Even ICUs aren't built with cleaning in mind.

And as mentioned in the article there's the for-profit over-use of azoles; where the profitability of anything becomes the sole criteria on which it's judged - and god forbid anyone interfere with that.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, April 7, 2019 1:33 PM

Everything is going to be alright.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

RUE

Monday, April 8, 2019 12:16 AM

My father died of vancomycin resistant MRSA pneumonia. You might have heard of MRSA, it's the multiply drug-resistant bacteria that was the first of the recognized super-infectious agents, and vancomycin was the antibiotic of last resort.

Back in 2012 it was estimated that 20,000 people died each year from antibiotic resistant infections, today that estimate is roughly 176,000.

The data is what it is. The processes in place are what they are. Neither cares what we think. But the future will roll over us unless we do something different.