Just five months after federal health officials asked hospitals and physicians to be on the lookout for an often-fatal, antibiotic-resistant fungus called Candida auris, 13 cases have been reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday. The first seven cases, which are described in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, occurred in New York, Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey in 2013 (one case), 2015 (one case), and this year (five cases). Five of the first seven cases had not been flagged as C. auris at the time the patients were hospitalized, underlining the difficulty of identifying the fungus. The global spread of C. auris has had public health officials on alert for imported cases, but all of the U.S. cases seem to have been contracted domestically. When scientists sequenced the genomes of C. auris in the first seven cases, they found that they were related to strains from South Asia and South America.

Source: Fox News November 04, 2016 15:00 UTC