Fungus Candida auris infections spreading across US, CDC warns

Having to sterilize a whole facility will get old fast

As with all pathogens, the scary thing isn't necessarily what we're seeing now, it's what we might expect to see in the future. The more C. Auris infections occur, the more opportunity it has to mutate into something scarier. And yeah, confinement and sterilization is a huge expense.

Well, our copious use of antifungals seems to be doing the opposite, so I'd say it's worth a try.

Thanks to your comment I just learned from the internet that some people use brewer's yeast and yogurt to make skin masks! (no idea if that would help with candida infections, but I thought it was interesting)

yea i think their marketing push got a little out of hand...

You're thinking of Cordyceps, not Candida. But yes, both are fungi so generally speaking sure

What are the regulations in this area? Seems like a wild west kinda situation right now in biotech. Well and even with regulations, I can't see enforcement being easy or even possible.

The article discusses Candida which is a specific genus of yeast includes species that live with us humans, and can sometimes cause disease, mainly in immunocompromised individuals. Most of the yeast being engineered with CRISPER is non-pathogenic [1] and is less likely to mutate to this sort of thing. The mutation the article discusses is more like how bacterias evolve with anti-bacterial drug use. Much like bacterias, pathogenic fungi experience evolutionary pressure from their environment and the drugs we use to control them.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31280424/

Candida auris was discovered in 2009. CRISPR in 2012. Candida auris itself could not have been the result of any CRISPR editing experiment. Maybe you are suggesting that a particular strain of Candida auris is such a result. This is difficult to refute without an actual genomic analysis. But a much simpler explanation exists: Candida auris is nasty in itself. It does not need genetic engineering to be nasty. It is simply spreading in hospitals among immunocompromised patients because this is what Candida auris does. Per wikipedia [1]:

  > Often, candidiasis is acquired in hospitals by patients with weakened immune systems. C. auris can cause invasive candidiasis (fungemia) in which the bloodstream, the central nervous system, and internal organs are infected. It has attracted widespread attention because of its multiple drug resistance. Treatment is also complicated because it is easily misidentified as other Candida species. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_auris

Hard for things to spread when you're small groups of people without interaction with anyone outside your group. And yes small groups of people were routinely completely wiped out.

Something doesn't have to be capable of being an existential threat to civilization to be considered "bad."

> Nature had plenty of opportunities to wipe us out when we were at our weakest, and it failed.

But that wasn't when we were at our weakest, not necessarily. Diseases need to spread. When we lived in scattered hunter gatherer groups it was really tough for diseases to spread, and if they couldn't spread, it was difficult for them to persist in a population and evolve. Now the spreading is easy. Furthermore, spreading is easier among certain animal populations because we raise them packed into warehouses and we ship them around the world via truck, train, boat, and plane.

The world is a very different place, so using the past as a model to predict the future is dicey.

If you're genuinely interested, you'd be better off getting up to speed on the current research instead of putting forth extremely rudimentary theories.

There are two factors now which make things different:

1. As other commenters have pointed out, the ease of spread of any disease is orders of magnitude higher now than it was during cave-man days. With crowded cities, public transit, and air travel, pandemic-level diseases can spread across the world in a matter of days or weeks.

2. Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. We are, in a sense, selectively breeding pathogens that are both good at infecting humans and resistant to our treatments. That is a focused selective pressure that has never existed before, and may pose the biggest threat to us in the next 50-100 years. For a concrete example, look at this experiment which shows how quickly bacteria can evolve to overcome levels of antibiotics that are orders of magnitude more than we would ever give a human [0].

Yes, there will generally always be some subset of the human population that is resistant to any particular disease, but our measure of success is not "5% of humans will survive the next pandemic, so we're all good, let's it move along nothing to see here." If we start to regularly have drug-resistant pathogens that make hospital stays very dangerous for patients (imagine having a 1/3 or even 1/10 chance of dying at a hospital due to an infection entirely irrelevant to your condition) or just more common COVID-level pandemics, that would be a serious disruption to humanity, significantly increase general mortality rates across the board, and drastically change life as we know it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sLAQvEH-M

Surprised no one has already mentioned climate change.

The truly terrifying thing is that the reason fungi have not been a big threat to humans is that there was not evolutionary pressure for them to thrive in human body temperatures.

Now, due to the warming climate there is immense pressure. As fungi evolve to adapt to the warming climate, they are evolving to be able to infect and kill us.

> Unless a novel disease emerges or is manufactured that totally outclasses everything nature came up with in earth's history

What makes you think this is unlikely? Even putting aside that bioengineering is a very real thing, there is historical precedent for terrible novel diseases (e.g. black death, Spanish flu).

I'll also point out that "humanity is totally wiped out" and "we're going to be fine" are not exhaustive. A disease killing 10% of the world's population would not be fine.

> if a fungi could have wiped us out, it would already have

If a fungus could have already wiped out entire amphibian species, why didn't it to so before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chytridiomycosis

Ironically, improved ventilation/filtering - which was a good measure to help with COVID - might help here also.

What would you propose to change?

Lots of natural anti-fungal treatments we don't use. Garlic oil is one for example. The problem comes when you have to ensure the facility is clean after an outbreak. Hard to get rid off the infection.

> The pandemic created a lot more chronically ill people. This is a condition typically associated with people who are already seriously unwell.

You're making a huge leap.

The magnitude of "unwell" here is critical. This particular infection has been killing people who are at end of life -- people in nursing homes, hospice, etc. Maybe the pandemic created more of these people, but it's not the same thing as "long covid" (if that even has a definition).

Folks with these sorts of ME/CFS/Long Covid constellations of symptoms are simply not in the same class as elderly people in nursing homes.

No one is successfully treating candida with homeopathy and using the derogatory term "allopathy" for conventional medicine isn't really appropriate here.

Why would you assume that Candida auris is anything like common yeast? Different fungi feed on different things.

Antibiotic resistant infections are a whole other ballgame. You have to do better than that to kill them.