Drug-resistant fungi are a threat to modern medicine

Drug resistance is particularly worrying in the case of antifungals because treatment options for fungal infections are more limited than for bacterial infections. C. auris is resistant to the drugs most commonly used to treat fungal infections. So patients are sicker for longer and survival rates are lower. In India, as many as half of those who develop a blood stream infection with C. auris die, but since in many cases they were already critically ill, C. auris is not recorded as the ultimate cause of death. Unlike other fungi that rarely transmit between humans, C. auris can be passed from patient to patient in a hospital. This is because of its unusual ability to last for long periods of time on hospital surfaces, such as bed rails and door handles. The combination of being transmissible, hard to remove from hospital surfaces and difficult to treat, make it capable of causing deadly outbreaks.