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Health See other Health Articles Title: Hidden Epidemic: Death By Hospital It is only a matter of time now……. we must read between the lines. Public health authorities are not forthcoming about a fungal infection that has been stealthily killing people for over a decade. There will be no safe place to run to. Hospitals will be cordoned off. Nurses will refuse to go to work. Human populations will die off in large numbers, starting in areas where anti-fungal herbicides have been employed that spawn drug resistance, as an ongoing public health threat that has been hidden for too long, spreads beyond hospital walls and now cannot be reversed. That is a predictable scenario given the following facts that have been hidden for too long. Health authorities are not going to tell the public what is really going on. Most hospitals are threatened with being quarantined and even shuttered if not completely avoided by a frightened public. Visitors will not be allowed to enter. The health threat posed by a treatment-resistant fungus – Candida auris – is unprecedented. It has a 30-60% mortality rate! Even after massive sanitation and decontamination measures, the fungal killer that is now making news headlines could not be eradicated. An aerosol hydrogen peroxide mist was sprayed in a hospital room; killed off all other bacteria and fungi. Only one organism grew back – Candida auris. We are only left to guess what health authorities and hospital administrators are hiding to save their own jobs. The hospital industry, with its 6210 hospitals, 931,000 beds (66% occupancy), 36 million admissions, 1.7 million registered nurses, a daily census over 600,000 and $1+ trillion of insurance billings, is at risk. Only one hospital in South America has admitted it temporarily closed down its intensive care unit over deaths induced by drug-resistant fungus. Now another hospital in the United Kingdom has more recently come forward to say it retrospectively tabulated 70 cases of Candida auris dating back to 2015; 90-98% of patients were resistant to fluconazole, the front-line drug for this infection; 18% were resistant to amphotericin B, the anti-fungal drug of last resort; a 20% mortality rate was reported. Forced to choose between their jobs or the lives of their patients, which choice do you think the for-profit private hospital industry, which is traded on Wall Street, will choose? The most common reason why hospitals have difficulty detecting Candida auris is that it is not in their databases. So they haven’t known it existed, that is, until now. This drug-resistant fungus is sweeping the globe, but not by usual means of transmission. This unconquerable infection has been allowed to smolder since it was first reported in 2009 in Asia, but in reality, it was probably killing off hospitalized patients long before that. While hospital patients were dying, the fungal killer was not listed in laboratory databases so it couldn’t be classified. It is often misidentified with other related yeasts. A confessional published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy says: “The real burden of Candida auris is uncertain owing to a lack of availability of diagnostic methods for its identification.” The mycologists are lost at sea. As a chilling report published in the journal Clinical & Infectious Diseases notes, there has been a simultaneous emergence of Candida auris on different continents with the same genetic profile, which suggests it didn’t emanate from a single source and then spread. A retrospective investigation finds a case of Candida auris was reported in 1996 and another in 2008 before the so-called first reported case in 2009. We can accurately presume it’s been killing off hospital patients for some time now. A secret pandemic Public health authorities are sworn to secrecy. A report published in the New York Times notes that hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs. The CDC under its agreement with States, is not allowed to make public the location or name of hospitals involved in outbreaks. A public health contradiction is deadly cases of food poisoning in a restaurant certainly make news headlines but if deaths occur in a hospital due to drug-resistant infections, it is not disclosed. The public be damned. The Centers For Disease Control is not legally obligated to reveal which hospitals are reporting deaths from this killer that sprung up simultaneously in different parts of the world as if it were planted there. The underlying link between the use of anti-fungal herbicides in agriculture and these outbreaks has been disclosed to the Centers For Disease Control whose officials who are mum on the subject. The body counts must be far higher. It is “death by hospital.” “Hospitals are not obliged to inform patients if they have the infection, which is most commonly contracted in hospitals.” “The move is intended to protect centers and states from panic and media attention…” The occurrence of resistant infections is often “cloaked in secrecy.” And while this monster yeast has yet to spread outside hospitals, it certainly poses a threat to those who are immune compromised – diabetics, malnourished (in particular zinc deficient individuals), those individuals who take immune suppressant drugs, and the very young (under 5 years of age) and the very old, whose immune systems typically aren’t up to par. Here is how news reporters and infectious disease specialists describe this horror story: “The most worrying ‘superbug’ on the CDC’s radar…”. – The Daily Mail “This bug is the most difficult we’ve ever seen.” – Chief of Mycotic Diseases, CDC. “There aren’t many bright spots in the looming battle against Candida auris.” — Wired.com Nightmare on hospital street It survives despite all the hospital disinfection strategies to destroy it. Gowns, gloves, disinfectants, bleach have all failed. The longer the hospital stay the greater the chance of infection. Patients with breathing tubes, urinary catheters, intravenous tubes, are at greatest risk. More than 90% of Candida auris infections are resistant to one drug and another 30% resistant to two or more drugs. In general, Candida auris is uniformly non-susceptible to fluconazole (which is front-line drug treatment), which has also been reported previously in Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America and North America. When other anti-fungals fail, amphotericin B is employed as a drug of last resort. However, “remarkably high amphotericin B resistance rates, i.e. ~8% in Candida auris warrant attention as amphotericin B resistance is extremely rare in Candida species.” “The last-resort drug, amphotericin, is so toxic, it’s severe fever-and-chills have been dubbed “shake and bake.” Doctors avoid amphotericin whenever possible. Will it spread beyond hospitals: yes or no? Journalist Susan Matthews writing at Slate.com says the public doesn’t need to worry about the new drug-resistant super fungus. “The fungus is a very legitimate public health issue, but for almost everyone in the world,” she says, “it will not be a personal health issue.” Matthews notes that the fungal outbreak is more likely to be hyped to demand greater funding for research than it is to protect the public at large. While there may be some truth to that, to the contrary, Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, Associate Professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, writing at Forbes.com, says “don’t take Candida lightly.” He says: “It can invade your body and kill you if your immune system is weakened.” This fungus doesn’t know where hospital walls start and stop. Screening efforts found 453 people had the yeast on their body but were not ill. This “fungus that is among us” is ubiquitous. It’s not the fungus, it is a compromised immune system that is allowing this fungus to kill. Modern medicine is paying a steep price for its over-reliance upon (failed) drugs rather than a strategy to elevate immune defenses. “Unless more effective new medicines are developed and unnecessary use of antimicrobial drugs is sharply curbed, risk will spread to healthier populations.” Scientists predict millions could die, eclipsing the number who die of cancer! A recent report published in the journal PLoS Pathogens entitled “Candida auris: An Emerging Pathogen ‘Incognito’” states: “Candida auris… carries an astonishingly high mortality rate.” Whereas most candida infections arise from the patient’s own gastrointestinal tract, this one spreads rapidly among patients, and it is efficiently transmitted from person-to-person. A nightmare no one wants to hear. It shuts off the immune system Another observation is that candida infections usually arise as the immune response is compromised, as evidenced by neutropenia – a shortage of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell that is a first responder to infection of any kind. But this time it’s different. Infectious disease specialist Dr. Jeniel Nett at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine notes that Candida auris is invasive despite the absence of neutropenia! Neutrophils usually kill fungi by a process called phagocytosis — the ingestion of fungi and other germs — and then disposes of these pathogens. About 50% fewer neutrophils are produced in response to Candida auris compared to Candida albicans, a more common form of candida infection. This fungus is actually turning off the immune response. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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