"The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it." Some hospitals had to throw out medical equipment because they could not be cleaned. It's known to grow along IV tubing. Furthermore, aerosolized h2o2 at normal concentrations doesn't work against it. The concern is great because the list and number of classes of antimycotics is short.
Supposedly, this is primarily a disease of those with weakened immune systems. The issue is that community spread risks evolution into something even worse.
Given how hard it is to treat fungi in general, having resistant fungi is very worrying.
Overall I think sadly that superbugs are going to be a far worse problem than covid-19 if we recklessly prescribe antimicrobial medicine we don't really need
20,000 people die of staph every year in the US (that's 1 in 6 reported cases) and almost all of it is now MRSA (resistant to Methicillin). VRSA (resistant to the even stronger vancomycin) and even VISA (immune to vancomycin) constantly pop up in other countries and are basically untreatable. If they get a foothold like MRSA, we can look forward to a lot more staph deaths.
Lots of diseases like tuberculosis, C diff, VRE, CRE, gonorrhea, strep, and probably several I haven't thought about all have developed antibiotic resistance to a common antibiotic (tuberculosis is often resistant to multiple antibiotics).
Gram-negative bacteria variants immediately gain a huge resistance to current antibiotics.
We really need research into new antibiotics to treat these diseases, but there's not much money in creating or producing them. These diseases kill many more people than COVID (especially over a few years). We should be funding them at least as well as we've funded COVID as finding them probably grants another hundred years of treatable diseases just like the discovery of penicillin did.
This is one of the worrying aspects of Covid for me. When hospitals get overloaded, patients are less isolated than usual and staff are less likely to notice non-emergent conditions. One can imagine a scenario where an unnoticed C. Auris infection spreads to multiple immunocompromised patients. Fortunately, that wouldn't cause a runaway pandemic at this point, but it sounds like it could destroy the ICU or even a hospital.
Supposedly, this is primarily a disease of those with weakened immune systems. The issue is that community spread risks evolution into something even worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-can...