The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Friday that the first-ever cases of a potentially deadly fungus resistant to all drugs, called Candida Auris, have been reported in two hospitals in Texas and a nursing home in Washington DC, Fox News reports.
The CDC’s Dr. Meghan Lyman of emphasizes that this is first clustering of resistance in which patients seemed to be getting infections- impervious to all three major classes of medications- from each other.
The fungus Candida auris, first reported in Japan in 2009, is a harmful form of yeast thought to live on the skin and inside the body, prompting immune system complications for those already in poor health and is considered dangerous to hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems being most deadly when it enters the bloodstream, heart or brain.
There’s no data on the most appropriate therapy for pan-resistant infections, CDC pointed.
The CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that since the beginning of the year, the Antibiotic Resistance Laboratory Network has detected independent clusters of pan-resistant or echinocandin-resistant cases in Texas and the District of Columbia.
A total of 101 clinical and screening cases have been reported by the CDC from January to April in Washington, with 22 cases detected in patients at medical institutions in Texas during the same period. The report additionally noted that no known epidemiologic links were identified between the Texas and DC clusters with 30% thirty-day combined mortality in both outbreaks.
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