A deadly fungus has reportedly reached U.S. hospitals where it is said to have killed a few patients.
Federal health officials said the yeast known as Candida auris has already infected 13 patients and killed four.
"It appears that C. auris arrived in the United States only in the past few years," said Dr. Tom Chiller, who heads the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's branch of fungal diseases.
Global Outbreak
According to the CDC, the disease was first identified in 2009 in a Japanese patient who had an ear ailment.
The fungus C. auris has caused a global outbreak and has been detected in countries such as Britain, India and Israel. Making the appearance as bloodstream infections, it has defied treatment from antifungal drugs.
An alert was issued by the CDC in June asking U.S. laboratories to report suspected cases of the fungus to federal, state and local healthcare departments.
It is likely that the outbreak may compound the task of healthcare authorities worldwide, who are already struggling to control bacteria that are resistant to most antibiotics.
The toll from drug-resistant superbug bacteria is already too high, with 23,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide dying from superbug strains annually.
Symptoms Of C. Auris
According to experts, C. auris is an ascomycetous species of fungus and grows as yeast. It causes candidiasis infections with a display of symptoms such as difficulty in swallowing, a burning sensation, genital itching, and discharge of white fluids.
The CDC reports that all patients affected in the U.S. had become very sick. They included a paraplegic in Illinois whose catheter was attacked by C. auris and four more from New Jersey, New York and Maryland.
According to CDC officials, all these patients had severe medical conditions, including cancer, and had been in the hospital for 18 days when they tested positive.
However, doctors are still unsure if the killer fungus was the main reason for their death or their underlying health problems were to be blamed.
Difficult To Identify Cases
One of the major challenges of C. auris, including finding a cure, is the difficulty in identifying the fungus. It needs special laboratory facilities. Otherwise, most samples go misidentified as other fungal species, the CDC said.
Meanwhile, Amesh Adalja, senior associate at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre warned that C. auris carries high mortality threats.
The CDC appealed to all stakeholders to ensure the thorough cleaning of hospital rooms and a strict check of facilities to confirm whether patients admitted had this infection.
"We need to act now to better understand, contain and stop the spread of this drug-resistant fungus," said CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden.
