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Three years ago, US health officials warned hundreds of thousands of clinicians in hospitals across the country to look for a new type of fast-spreading, highly drug-resistant yeast that can cause life-threatening infections hospitalized patients around the world.
Candida auris has become a serious threat to global health since its identification a decade ago, especially for patients with compromised immune systems. It has been reported in more than 30 countries and is probably more prevalent than this, because the body is difficult to identify without specialized laboratory methods. It resists multiple antifungal medications and can spread between patients in hospitals and other health care settings and cause epidemics.
The fungus can cause infections of the bloodstream, heart or brain, and preliminary studies estimate that it is fatal in 30 to 60% of patients.
The researchers never managed to isolate the fungus from the natural environment nor to understand how genetically distinct versions appeared independently at about the same time in India, South Africa and South America.
Researchers in the United States and the Netherlands now have a new theory: they suggest that global warming may have played a key role and suggest that it could be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change, according to a study released Tuesday. in MBio, a journal of the American Society of Microbiology.
Fungal infections in humans are rare. Mammals have a more advanced immune system than other organisms exposed to the risk of fungal infections, and most environmental fungi can not grow at human body temperature, said Arturo Casadevall, one of the authors of the new study, microbiologist and immunologist. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
But as the climate has warmed up, researchers say that C. auris has been able to adapt, which has allowed him to reproduce at a temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Casadevall and his colleagues at the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas and the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands compared C. auris to his closest species and found that the deadly yeast was able to grow at higher temperatures.
"The most mysterious thing is that Candida auris has appeared simultaneously on three continents, and it's very difficult to explain it," Casadevall said. Something has happened to allow the body to "bubble up and cause disease.
"You have to try to think, what could be the unifying cause here? They are different societies, different populations, "he said. "But what they have in common is that the world is warming up."
Casadevall said the study provided guidance for further research. "We gather facts to explain something that mystifies," he said. If scientists could find the bog or lake where this mushroom came from and badyze its other close relatives, researchers could compare C. auris adaptation to warm weather growth.
The researchers warned that changes in the environment related to global warming do not explain the emergence of the fungus.
"It's an interesting theory, it's a very good theory, but it has to be proven," said Luis Ostrosky, an infectious disease researcher at UTHealth Houston's McGovern Medical School.
The widespread use of antifungal medications and the intensive use of fungicides on crops are among other theories on the emergence of the fungus, Ostrosky said. His own theory about his sudden appearance in the world: "We are dealing with equipment or medicine that is contaminated by this organism during the manufacturing process, but we have never been able to prove it."
In the United States, public health officials have stated that the fungus is an example of a resistant organism inadvertently imported into the country by a patient and spreading. (The fungus was found in the ear of a Japanese woman in 2009, "auris" is an ear in Latin.)
In June 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a clinical alert regarding the pathogen. Two months later, the first seven American cases were reported to the CDC. By May 2017, this number had risen to 77 and by July 12, 2019, there were 716 cases. Most cases have been detected in the New York, New Jersey and Chicago areas.
Patients can wear the body on their skin for months or more, and the rustic yeast can live on the surfaces for a month or more.
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