A fungus described by the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) as a ‘serious global health threat’ has been found in various places in the wild.
Candida auris was first described in Japan in 2009, before spreading to South Korea, Asia, Europe and across the US. The main challenge of the fungus – more specifically a type of yeast – is that it is often resistant to multiple antifungal agents used to treat. Candida infections. In addition, it is difficult to identify, it can remain in the host for several months and can easily spread within hospital settings – especially where it has not been correctly identified.
In a new study, medical mycologist Anuradha Chowdhary, PhD, led a team to analyze soil, sand and water samples collected from beaches, swamps and mangrove swamps in the tropical Andaman Islands. Even in the samples taken from salt marshes, where human activity is low, the researchers found Candida auris – with one of the two samples susceptible to various antifungal agents.
More worrying were samples taken from areas such as the beach, where 22 samples were found to contain the fungus – all of which are resistant to multiple fungicides.
“The isolates found in the area where human activity took place were more related to strains we see in the clinical setting,” Chowdhary said in a statement. According to her, future studies could possibly explain the connection. ‘It may come from plants, or it may fall off human skin, which we know C. auris can colonize. We need to investigate more environmental niches for the pathogen. ‘
The findings, the authors write in their study published in the journal mBio, are the first time the fungus has been discovered outside a hospital setting. From genetic testing of the samples, they believe that the fungus can survive well in certain conditions outside human hosts.
“The high genetic diversity of C. albicans from old oaks show that they can live in this area for long periods, ‘writes the team of the separate pathogenic yeast. Candida albicans. “Similarly, isolation of C. auris from the marine environment wetlands indicate as a niche for C. auris outside its human host. ‘
An earlier hypothesis suggested that the fungus could be native to wetlands, and that it went unnoticed in humans before it became pathogenic to humans when adaptations to higher temperatures due to climate change allowed it to thrive in us and other mammals.
“The observation that one environmental isolate grew more slowly at mammalian temperatures than clinical strains is consistent with the idea that their ancestor recently adapted to higher temperatures,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in a commentary on the study.
“The knowledge that C. auris can be recovered from the environment must undertake additional searches to define its ecological niches, and the analysis of future environmental isolates will provide evidence to confirm or refute the emerging hypothesis of global warming.”