MOS: Candida Auris, the impending plague

Hold onto your butts, yet another potential threat to humanity dropped.

Today’s Moment of Science… Definitely not a fun guy.

The depiction of a cordyceps outbreak in The Last Of Us is loosely based on how several fungal species can affect insects, but it’s a hop, skip, and several flying leaps removed from reality. Though cordyceps are described as having ‘zombifying’ effects on target species, ants on shrooms aren’t exactly passing spores around from biting each other. Rather, they’re all but forced to climb up the stalk of a plant where their jaws are snapped shut onto the underside of a leaf, attaching them there permanently. The hapless shell of a critter is now on auto-piñata mode, dispersing fungal spores through the wind to the next unsuspecting ant colony.

“But Ms. Auntie SciBabe, fungal monsters that will fuck up humanity are fiction, right?
…right?”

Way back in the before times, there were alarming headlines about a ‘grab those ankles and kiss yer ass goodbye’ fungus. Candida meaning ‘some yeasty bullshit’ and auris meaning ‘in the goddamn ear,’ it will no doubt surprise you that Candida auris (C. auris) is an infectious fungus that was first identified in 2009 in an ear infection. However, most infectious microbes aren’t too picky; this one will drop spores wherever it can.

Exposure often causes a lot of nothing, at least at first. A positive test for C. auris can indicate a patient has an infection or a colonization. It typically starts with colonization, in which the fungus is living on the skin or other part(s) of the body without causing symptoms. At this point, it can be spread to other people, develop into an active infection, or do fuckall. It’s considered an infection when the patient has symptoms, the most common of which are a high fever and chills.

Complicating this is the whole sordid ‘multi-drug resistance’ issue, which probably contributes to that nasty 30-60% fatality rate. By those numbers, it’s about as deadly as smallpox and the goddamn plague. Which might be too deadly for your average republican to call it a hoax.

So while numbers of diagnosed cases have shot up drastically since it was first detected in the US, why hasn’t it become the next big bad terrifying thing? It’s not filling up hospitals or shutting down life, so it’s tempting to think that after fourteen centuries of covid pandemic with nary a peep from the yeasty boys, there’s a chance we’re in the clear from this.

Hooboy.

It’s almost definitely too early to rule this fucker out, a slow burn rather than a raging inferno. New colonizations continue to grow by the thousands every year. As they spread, in many cases undetected, the spores of deadly infections quietly seed themselves in at-risk populations of hospitalized immunocompromised patients. It’s also unclear, with so many new colonizations, what percentage may eventually become infected.

The first fungus we’re facing with this capacity, with the high potential for multidrug resistance and spreading in healthcare facilities, it’s been described by medical professionals as a “nightmare scenario.”

There’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that it’s gonna be a while until this feels less like the existential threat hanging over us that it is. The good news? At least at this point, you’re unlikely to catch it like a cold or flu. Even with an exposure, there’s a long road between that and an active infection. That said, no matter how your health is doing, some folks are walking around with a colonization they’re unaware of. So if you have concerns, talk to your doctor about whether testing is warranted. And to prevent spreading or catching it, we should probably all get a bit of that March of 2020 energy and scrub our hands like our lives depend on it.

This has been your Moment of Science, wondering where Pedro Pascal is when I need him.

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About SciBabe 375 Articles
Yvette d'Entremont, aka SciBabe, is a chemist and writer living in North Hollywood with her roommate, their pack of dogs, and one SciKitten. She bakes a mean gluten free chocolate chip cookie and likes glitter more than is considered healthy for a woman past the age of seven.

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