“I think we have to get this onto people’s radar,” said researcher David Perlin, about Candida auris, a potentially deadly fungus. It spreads by contact with contaminated medical equipment and touchable surfaces, where it can survive for weeks. People can catch it and spread it without getting sick themselves.
“You can easily touch someone and transmit it — to a bedrail, from a bedrail to another patient. And it’ll colonize the patient’s skin, so you’ll see it there. And you see this among our sickest patients,” said Perlin, chief scientific officer and executive vice president of the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation.
“As it inflames — particularly for a patient who’s sick or immune-compromised — it can then get into the bloodstream. And that’s when it becomes dangerous or deadly,” said Dr. Gian Varbaro, chief medical officer at Bergen New Bridge Medical Center, who added that the fungus is highly drug-resistant. C. auris first took off from a New Jersey/New York hot spot in 2016 and has since spread across the nation.
As the outbreak expands, in 2022 the US logged about 5700 positive tests for C. auris — and 2400 clinical cases — 94 of them, here in NJ, where cases cluster in the northeast region. Researchers in one study found, “The COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated C. auris transmission.
“During the pandemic, we were probably being more vigilant for airborne diseases — and not for other infection,” said Bergen New Bridge’s Dr Gian Varbaro.
