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Superbug yeast portends return of human decimation by massive pandemics

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https://www.wired.com/story/the-strange-...bug-yeast/

EXCERPT: . . . The name of the yeast is Candida auris. It’s been on the radar of epidemiologists only since 2009, but it’s grown into a potent microbial threat, found in 27 countries thus far. Science can’t yet say where it came from or how to control its spread, and hospitals are being forced back into old hygiene practices—putting patients into isolation, swabbing rooms with bleach—to try to control it.

To a medical system that’s been dealing with worsening antibiotic resistance for decades, this chronology feels somewhat familiar: just another, potentially tougher battle to face. But the struggle to keep this resistant yeast from surging is a warning sign that relying on standard responses won't work. As the foes continue to evolve, medicine needs both new tech, and surprisingly old techniques, to fight its microbial wars. “This bug is the most difficult we’ve ever seen,” says Dr. Tom Chiller, the chief of mycotic diseases at the CDC, who made the Ebola remark at the 20th Congress of the International Society for Human and Animal Mycology in Amsterdam. “It’s much harder to kill.”

The center of the emerging problem is that this yeast isn’t behaving like a yeast. Normally, yeast hangs out in warm, damp spaces in the body, and surges out of that niche only when its local ecosystem veers out of balance. That’s what happens in vaginal yeast infections, for instance, and also in infections that bloom in the mouth and throat or bloodstream when the immune system breaks down.

But in that standard scenario, the yeast that has gone rogue only infects the person it was residing in. C. auris breaks that pattern. It has developed the ability to survive on cool external skin and cold inorganic surfaces, which allows it to linger on the hands of healthcare workers and on the doorknobs and counters and computer keys of a hospital room. With that assist, it can travel from its original host to new victims, passing from person to person in outbreaks that last for weeks or months....

MORE: https://www.wired.com/story/the-strange-...bug-yeast/
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