(NEXSTAR) – Hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities are grappling with a deadly, drug-resistant fungus that has infected at least 7,000 people in 2025, according to tracking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Candida auris is a fungus that was first reported in the United States in 2016 and has spread rapidly over the past few years. It can survive on surfaces for long periods of time and then be transmitted to patients through catheters, breathing tubes, or IVs.
Certain strains of fungi are considered superbugs because they are resistant to all types of antibiotics commonly used to treat fungal infections. While healthy people may be able to fight off the infection on their own, the fungus can be deadly in health care settings where it spreads, where people are often sick and vulnerable.
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“If you get this pathogen that’s resistant to any treatment, we can’t give you any treatment to help you fight it. You’re on your own,” Melissa Nolan, assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina, told Nexstar.
The fungus’ drug resistance makes it particularly difficult to control. The CDC reports that by 2025, more than half of states will report clinical cases of C. auris. With one week left until this year’s data, annual case numbers are approaching last year’s record-breaking figure of more than 7,500 cases.
See which states are reporting the most C. auris cases in the map below. Data are missing for two states: Alabama and Florida.
Some scientists speculate that climate change is causing the spread of C. auris and similar pathogens.
Microbiologist Arturo Casadevall, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told The Associated Press that historically, fungi have had a hard time surviving our bodies’ warmer body temperatures. But as the climate warms, fungi are adapting.
“We have tremendous protection against environmental fungi because of our temperature. However, if the world warms and fungi also start to adapt to higher temperatures, some fungi … will reach what I call a temperature barrier” where they will be able to survive in the human body, Casadevall said.
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In the past, the CDC estimated that “based on information from a limited number of patients, 30-60 percent of people infected with C. auris die. However, many of these people have other serious medical conditions that also increase their risk of death.”
A study published in July focused on C. auris patients in Nevada and Florida and found that more than half of the patients required admission to an intensive care unit and more than a third required mechanical ventilation. More than half of the patients, whose average age was between 60 and 64, also required a blood transfusion.
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