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Candida auris: The new fungus that threatens Humanity
The risk code for the growth and spread of microorganisms highly resistant to antibiotics and antifungals has been ringing for years. The “Black Prince” of these microorganisms, a species of “Fungus of Darkness”, is now proving to be the very deadly Candida auris, which first appeared in the ear of a Japanese woman ten years ago (hence Auris), but has been attacking unannounced for five years. in various hospitals around the world, literally harvesting patients.
Nobody knows where he “holds his hat”, but also how he can deal with it. Relatives of some patients complain that even the nursing staff sometimes avoids, as much as possible, and approaches the patients, because the fungus grows everywhere, from the veins to the ventilation pipes of the hospitals.
They can not deal with him, they can not even disinfect the rooms of the patients who died! In one case, experts at Imperial College rushed to London’s famous Royal Brompton Private Hospital to disinfect it. One week after a special machine sprayed the entire area with hydrogen peroxide, all but one of the microorganisms were killed: Candida Auris! He was still growing!
The management of Royal Brompton did not even know how to disinfect the room, not to deal with the fungus. However, he did much better in dealing with… information about his “visit”, so as not to reduce the attendance of rich patients from the Middle East and the rest of Europe, in which he specializes.
Hospital management and local, regional and national health authorities conceal, as far as possible, the existence, action and global expansion of Candida Auris. Of course, this is not without consequences, as it exposes patients who go to hospitals affected by the fungal epidemics to an unreasonable risk, while they could go elsewhere or postpone their treatment.
It should be noted that the fungus affects a significant percentage of patients in the institutions it “visits”, sometimes up to 50%, and about 30% of the infected die within three months.
Insult and Nemesis
Scientists and environmentalists have long warned of the consequences of reckless use of antibiotics and other drugs, both in medicine and in Georgia. But in the ears of the deaf. Modern Medicine and modern Georgia are under the pressure of a social organization that is completely and outrageously oriented towards individual profit and the enrichment of very few minorities, without being limited by any other criteria or somewhat credible social or state controls.
In such a society, interests are reigning and developing, such as those who are often and not unjustifiably accused even of multinational criminal practices of the drug and the mutants, the Monsters, we should call them better. With a power many times greater than that of the most powerful States, these multinationals are growing like Cancer, to the detriment of the human body. Their enormous power decisively influences the thinking of societies, their “Ideology”, but also the direction of Science, including Medicine.
The massive intervention of people in nature, the removal of our lives from any balance that nature itself has formed over thousands of years, an economic and social organization that aims to enrich the smallest minorities, ignoring any other criterion inevitably leads to great natural reactions. of which it is not certain that humanity will be able to survive for more than a few decades if Homo Sapiens does not try to live up to its name, instead of behaving to the contrary.
The human species at the biggest crossroads since its inception!
On the other hand, the emergence of microorganisms such as Candida Auris or extreme weather events, such as storms in the Mediterranean, can certainly offer a huge service, if they serve as warning points, capable of leading people and societies to decisive action. .
Mankind, for the first time in its history, today has the technological means to meet the basic needs of the present, but also of a much larger population. At the same time, however, both its social organization and our psychological structure are “barbaric” and “prehistoric”.
Who is most affected by Candida Auris?
Candida auris mainly affects people with weakened immune systems and half of those infected with it die within 90 days, writes the New York Times. In the last five years, it has struck a neonatal unit in Venezuela and a hospital in Spain, forcing a renowned British medical center to close. The microorganism “took root” in India, Pakistan and South Africa.
Candida auris recently “landed” in New York, New Jersey and Illinois, leading the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to call it an “emergency threat” When a patient at Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn fungus died, the whole room where he was treated was found positive, from the walls and the phones, to the curtains and the mattress. The hospital had to make unprecedented efforts to disinfect the patient’s room.
Candida auris is perhaps, at worst, the most formidable example of new threats, such as the rise of drug-resistant infections, threats that seem very difficult to impossible to address, at least in the current practice of medicine.
The cause of the phenomenon
For decades, public health experts have warned that the misuse of antibiotics in both medicine and agriculture has reduced the effectiveness of drugs that used to treat microbial infections that were deadly in the past. Now, in addition to microbial infections, we also have an outbreak of resistant fungi that, as the American newspaper notes, “adds a frightening new dimension to a problem that undermines one of the pillars of modern medicine.”
In short, microorganisms, whether they are bacteria or fungi, want to live and to survive they gradually develop defenses against the attacks they receive from drugs.
As for the calls to reduce the abuse of antibiotics in both medicine and agriculture, they have not brought great results.
The massive use of chemicals, instead of the most difficult attempt to change the way of life or to try to support the natural healing forces, has become an “ideology” of both patients and doctors, but also responds to the huge financial interests of the multinational drug, which, more powerful than most states, have often even been accused of their criminal practices.
However, some analysts believe that the abuse of antifungal drugs in an increasingly chemical agriculture is responsible for the emergence of Candida Auris.
Both Chemical Medicine and Chemical Agriculture of our time are much better adapted to the pursuit of capitalism, organized to the point of frenzy by modern neoliberalism, to raise the “performance” of the workers. For example, in terms of short-term economic efficiency, it is better not to send someone for a long time on leave to a sanatorium or to change his position and type of work, but to give him a “miracle pill” or to give him a surgery”.
Resistant microorganisms are more lethal to organisms with immature or defective immune systems, such as newborns, the elderly, smokers, diabetics, and patients with autoimmune disorders who take steroids to suppress the body’s defenses.
Global threat more serious than cancer!
Scientists say that unless new, more effective treatments are discovered and the use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture is not drastically reduced, then healthier populations will eventually be affected. British researchers estimate that in 2050 ten million people could die from such causes, compared to eight who will die from cancer. According to 2010 figures, two million people in the United States are infected with persistent infections each year and 23,000 die from them. Recent estimates from the Washington University School of Medicine put the death toll at 162,000 and the estimated 700,000 worldwide.
The first major candida auris epidemic in Europe occurred in a London hospital in 2015-16 with 72 patients. There have been 587 Candida auris infections in the United States since 2013. Many cases have occurred in India and Pakistan. The first outbreak in South America occurred in 2012-13 at a Venezuelan medical center, where five of the 18 infected died. A genetically distinct variety of Candida auris in South Africa affected at least 451 patients between 2012 and 16.
In late 2015, an Imperial College London specialist received a panicked phone call from the Royal Brompton Hospital in London that he had been unable to “cleanse” himself of the fungus for three months. Terrified hospital officials told her: “We have no idea where it comes from, what we do know is that it spreads like wildfire in the forest.”
Under the direction of an Imperial College specialist, hospital staff used a special machine to inject hydrogen peroxide aerosol into the room used by a patient with C. Auris.
After a week there was no one alive as an organism in the room. Except for one: the fungus Candida Auris.
Of course, the fungus is spreading, not the information about it. The hospital, a specialist treatment center for lung and heart problems, with wealthy clients from the Middle East and Europe, alerted the British government and already infected patients, but made no public announcement about the epidemic.
Hospital administrations and local, regional and national authorities around the world seem to be doing what they can to hide the problem. The above incident received very little publicity in Britain and remained almost unknown internationally.
But while almost everyone outside Britain and very few inside knew what was going on in this hospital, Candida Auris decided to visit the 900-bed Universitari i Politècnic La Fe hospital in Valencia, Spain.
372 people were infected at this hospital, of which 85 developed infections. 40% of patients who developed infections died within 30 days, according to the Mycoses review. The management of the hospital did not consider it appropriate to inform either the public or the patients who had not been infected about what was happening. ‘When the New York Times contacted one of the doctors who wrote this article in the review Mycoses, who told them that the hospital did not want to talk about the case, so as not to damage its public image.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
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