Candida auris: A fungus hospitals don’t want to talk about

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/candida-auris-hospitals.html

by DVassallo • 7 years ago

218 69 7 years ago

nytimes.com

pstuart2• 7 years ago

The lack of transparency here is criminal.

edejong• 7 years ago

By the hospitals or by the government unwilling to regulate disclosure?

eeZah7Ux2• 7 years ago

Both.

pstuart2• 7 years ago

As eeZah7Ux noted, both.

gumby• 7 years ago

I used to work on antifungal drugs (though not against C Auris) and I don’t remember it being any sort of secret. It’s just not a sexy microbe.

Antifungal drugs tend to be very toxic for humans too, though luckily most healthy people’s immune systems are pretty good at rejecting them.

el_benhameen2• 7 years ago

I think the point of the article is not that they're trying to find info on an unsexy microbe. It's that hospitals and similar organizations don't want to talk about antifungal-resistant C Auris because they don't want to be pegged as "that hospital where people get candidiasis", and that secrecy is harmful to the public's ability to find out about the problem.

aszantu• 7 years ago

We live in a world, where almost all skin care products contain anti-fungals. People treat minor skin conditions with essential oils and teatree oil. Fungicides are sprayed on the fields so the crop doesn't get infected and the same is done with factory farmed animals. No wonder these things get resistant...

neodypsis4• 7 years ago

It should be illegal to use fungicides or bactericides with medicinal value in non-human applications, especially on crops. I'm feeling hopeless regarding what our future chances are in fighting super-bugs. Could you elaborate more on why using tea tree oil contributes to drug-resistant Candida?

masklinn4• 7 years ago

It should be illegal to use fungicides or bactericides with medicinal value in non-human applications, especially on crops.

Fungi are one of the big crop killers. Potato blight, black pod disease, panama disease, mildews, … are all fungi.

ZeroFries• 7 years ago

What if using them on crops saved more lives, especially right now, by avoiding starvation scenarios in prone areas, farmers from going bankrupt (and upping risk of suicide), etc. It's not a simple problem, you have to do the cost-benefit analysis.

Sabinus• 7 years ago

Why would you add an anti fungal to a skincare product? In case the buyer has an infection?

hvidgaard2• 7 years ago

Fungal infections are the cause of most peoples dandruff issues, and the same fungi can result in skin issues in the rest of the face. So probably to kill that off.

eeZah7Ux2• 7 years ago

We live in a world, where

The comma should not be used there.

bayesian_horse• 7 years ago

As compared to Kambucha, the fungus everyone wants to talk about.

rob742• 7 years ago

I'm frankly surprised they should be surprised about this - wanting to talk to a hospital about their issues with resistant germs is like asking a restaurant about the roaches in their kitchen...

threezero• 7 years ago

The surprise is that hospitals are allowed to act this way. Patient privacy is one thing, but this is attempting to suppress information to the public about deadly infections.

okasaki3• 7 years ago

Act in what way? Is there some obligation for hospital staff to talk to journalists?

Dylan168074• 7 years ago

People don't come into a restaurant pouring out buckets of super-roaches that are immune to all normal methods of extermination.

If a restaurant has roaches it's their own fault. If a hospital has to fight back a resistant germ it doesn't show they did anything wrong.

rob742• 7 years ago

That's clear, however the consequences are the same: if word gets out that a certain hospital has these issues, people will avoid it, same as a restaurant with severe hygiene issues. So the tendency to keep this topic on the down low is understandable, even if I personally don't agree with it either...

sambeau3• 7 years ago

People do go into restaurants with viruses though, and restaurants get treated very harshly should people get infected from someone or some foodstuff there.

Restaurant's don't create viruses, they just pass them on, usually unwittingly (and sometimes despite good hygiene practices) but one nasty outbreak traced to a restaurant can destroy a reputation (and kill a business).

The classic case being Heston Blumetnthal's 'Fat Duck' restaurant where 240 people suffered gastroenteritis (nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea) due to norovirus, probably carried in Oysters:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/05/fat-duc...

Who is to blame here? Maybe the Oyster farmer, but maybe the distributor. It could have been a single employee with norovirus in the restaurant (or anywhere in the distribution chain).

Most likely no-one did anything wrong and this was just "one of those things"

"We also received full support by our insurers who found no fault in our practices following a report from a leading UK independent specialist. There is still no guaranteed safety measure in place today to protect the general public with regards to shellfish and viral contamination. For this reason we still do not serve oysters or razor clams at the Fat Duck."

mnw21cam• 7 years ago

Indeed. Some hospitals have really bad statistics on treatment-resistant infections. The reason? They are a better hospital, and they specialise in dealing with them, so when someone at another hospital is diagnosed with one, they get shipped there.

neodypsis4• 7 years ago

The CDC has a web page where it keeps track of the number of cases, as well as the geographical locations where they occurred [0]. Not currently there, but Costa Rica appears to report a new case just recently.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/fungal/candida-auris/tracking-c-auris.ht...

jonathanjaeger• 7 years ago

Luckily a couple biotech companies like Scynexis and Cidara Therapeutics are working on some novel anti-fungals (currently in stage 3 trials). Hopefully one or both make it through successfully and are approved by the FDA as cases rise.

atian• 7 years ago

Where the Candida albicans central crew at?

okasaki3• 7 years ago

I think as journalists write more and more articles that are catastrophising, clickbait-laden rubbish, they will find fewer and fewer people willing to talk to them. This is a hole they dug for themselves.

cryptica• 7 years ago

As far as I can see, there are no financial interests behind this article (in fact, all the financial interests are against it because it's criticising the lucrative medical system). Maybe it's slightly over dramatic but at least it seems pure in its intentions and it's good to see that the writer feels strongly about the topic.

This is real journalism and we need more of these articles. What we need fewer of are articles which promote financial interests and drive wealth centralization. These are abundant and nobody seems to be pointing those out.

kebman• 7 years ago

Sad to say, this is not clickbait. Microbes that are becoming resistant due to overuse of antibiotics is a serious problem, especially in countries that repress such information, or where the use of antibiotics is less firmly regulated.

I'm sure most people are aware that Eastern Europe, and especially Romania and Bulgaria has a rampant problem with resistent microbæ, but I was surprised to see that for instance Italy is almost equally as bad.

cm2187• 7 years ago

I am not sure about talking to them. But I do feel a “it’s the end of the world” fatigue. I understand the economic need to generate traffic, but we are told pretty much daily that we are at risk of some sort of deadly peril that will kill us all, whether it is ebola, this fungus, the swine flu, the bird flu, pollution poisoning, global warming, mad cow disease, etc etc.

I find myself in the position to dismiss automatically all these claims as bullshit, but it may be that one day they may get one right. There is a cost to crying wolf.

mschuster912• 7 years ago

I understand the economic need to generate traffic, but we are told pretty much daily that we are at risk of some sort of deadly peril that will kill us all, whether it is ebola, this fungus, the swine flu, the bird flu, pollution poisoning, global warming, mad cow disease, etc etc.

The problem is that we as societies haven't been doing much over the last decades and shit is culminating in the next maybe 10-30 years.

leptoniscool• 7 years ago

Copper and silver are good for stopping bacterial growth : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28407716/

Are there any materials can slow or stop fungal growth?

goldenkey• 7 years ago

Baby powder works wonders for fungus. It destroyed jock itch when the azole anti fungals couldnt. Just dry out the fungus if its external. Internal fungals are an entirely different beast..

Raphmedia• 7 years ago

Exactly. Fungus are usually quite straightforward to eradicate on the surface of the body or on non-porous material. The issue with Candida auris is that it gets in the patient's blood and inside the porous ceiling tiles and walls.

dfeojm-zlib• 7 years ago

To eradicate it after one patient died, a hospital in Brooklyn even “had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles” in his room.

- https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/candida-auris-hospitals...

gingabriska2• 7 years ago

I wonder what if some developed countries release these viruses in developing country with large population but not advance medical techniques. Would they be able to see evolution making people survive against this deadly fungus?

Then simply understanding the mechanism might lead to development of new drugs.

jbattle• 7 years ago

Like polio, malaria, yellow fever, rotavirus, trachoma, hepatitis? Sadly we have plenty of pathogens of all stripes in common circulation already.

Maybe I'm misreading what you wrote - but it kind of sounds like you are suggesting we knowingly infect some developing country with additional diseases, just to see what happens, in the hope it helps us make better medicine for ourselves? That would be kinda ... twisted

sli• 7 years ago

What you're suggesting is eugenics.

merricksb• 7 years ago

A related article, published around the same time as this one, was posted and got significant attention on HN about 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19590180

(Probably doesn't count as a dupe as this article is more about the secrecy than the infection itself).

Fjolsvith• 7 years ago

A workplace has to have Material Safety Sheets for hazardous chemicals that people can review for safety precautions and dangerous effects (per OSHA). Why wouldn't a hospital have something similar for communicable diseases?

giarc• 7 years ago

They likely do. My hospital has patient handouts that cover common antibiotic resistant organisms such as MRSA, VRE, CPO etc.

tomcam• 7 years ago

Not trying to be cynical or arch or snarky here. But considering what hospitals charge for things, isn’t it relatively affordable to do drywall work, tile replacement, etc.?

Candida auris: A fungus hospitals don’t want to talk about

Related Stories