Candida auris is an exciting new fungal infection that has popped up in drug resistant form all around the world. Doesn’t seem to have come from anywhere specific… just *everywhere.* Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the US it seems to be most prevalent in Illinois and New York.

A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy

Right now it seems to be a threat to the elderly and others with compromised immune system, killing about half of those admitted with the infection inside of 30 days. And that’s one of the things that creeps me out the most… it can take months to kill you, months during which you are an infection machine. In contrast, ebola does you in in a hurry, while AIDS takes forever… but AIDS is *very* difficult to transmit compared to Candida, which you simply spread throughout the environment. And it doesn’t need to live in you; it’s perfectly happy infecting your hospital room. The bed sheets, the pillow, the tray table, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the freakin’ window glass.

But don’t worry Millenials, I’m sure it’ll get around to mutating into a form that feast on you too.

The article has a lot of fun numbers about how many could, will and do die. Two that seem  potentially contradictory; an estimate that 162,000 die from drug resistant bugs in the US annually… and that 700,000 die from them world-wide. Seems odd that the US would be such a large percentage.