A man infected with the ‘killer fungus’ Candida auris died in Milan. According to Adnkronos Salute, the patient had arrived from Greece and had been hospitalized in the Sacco hospital in the Lombard capital for a stroke. From the laboratory tests to which he was subjected, several positivities were found, among which the most significant is precisely that of Candida auris. The man died this morning.
The man had entered the hospital a few days ago. And having arrived from Greece it would not be an indigenous case, but he would have the profile of the imported case. Candida auris is a fungus first described in 2009, after it was isolated in Japan from a woman’s ear (hence ‘auris’). In Italy, the first case of invasive C. auris infection was identified in 2019, followed by an outbreak that affected the northern regions in the 2020-2021 pandemic period, according to the Epicentro website of the Higher Institute of Health (ISS) .
Since 2019, both imported and indigenous cases have been described or notified, for a total of about 300 cases – Epicentro still reports – in an epidemic outbreak that mainly involved Liguria and Emilia Romagna. For example, Candida auris is spreading significantly in the United States, where the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have defined it as an “urgent threat” due to its antibiotic resistance. In the years of the 2020-2021 pandemic, infections increased significantly in US healthcare facilities, according to CDC data published in the ‘Annals of Internal Medicine’: in 2021, in particular, cases resistant to the most recommended and used drug for treatment tripled of C. auris infections, the echinocandins. Nationally, clinical cases in the United States increased from 476 in 2019 to 1,471 in 2021. Screening cases tripled from 2020 to 2021, for a total of 4,041. According to the CDC, this increase is also visible in 2022