Read the opening paragraph at Wired.com’s article and wonder why the news hasn’t been more widespread. To my mind this is one of the greatest risks modern civilisation will face this century….
A PATHOGEN THAT resists almost all of the drugs developed to treat or kill it is moving rapidly across the world, and public health experts are stymied how to stop it.
By now, that’s a familiar scenario, the central narrative in the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But this particular pathogen isn’t a bacterium. It’s a yeast, a new variety of an organism so common that it’s used as one of the basic tools of lab science, transformed into an infection so disturbing that one lead researcher called it “more infectious than Ebola” at an international conference last week.
Known as Candida auris and only discovered less than a decade ago, it has now spread to 27 countries.
Not well-known is why humans develop fevers. It is due to our high operating temperature, something believed to have evolved to stop fungal infections in their tracks. Mammals get the infections way less than other species.
It is possible that Candida auris is the reason – we evolved a high temperature to stop it wiping us out.
And now it is back, itself evolved to live at lower temperatures, and we have little or no defence if it keeps evolving like most superbugs do. Up to 60% mortality. Hospital outbreaks lasting a year…
If you are thinking it is rare and foreign, there have been 300+ cases in the USA so far, across 11 states.