Climate of Secrecy
In The Growers Solution, Winter, 2007 Volume 20 Issue 1 edition, Growers Chemical Corporation discussed in detail in the article "Antibiotic Resistance: Agriculture and Human Medicine" the problems with Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, or ARB. Since that article was published, the agricultural establishment has been forced by several world-wide events to address ARB while contending that the usage of antibiotics in livestock production was not a large contributor to the problem of ARB.
With the ARB problem in mind, it was with great interest that Growers Chemical Corporation became aware of Candida auris from an alert GMS contact. An article "Deadly germs, lost cures: A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy" (take note of this article's title) which appeared in The New York Times on April 6, 2019 describes the details of the fungus Candida auris, or C. auris.
The reason for the article in The New York Times is quite evident because of the serious nature surrounding C. auris. The article states that this fungus is found in hospitals and there appears to be no compound that can control the microbe which, upon entering the human bloodstream, causes death within a 30-day window. A quote from the article states: "C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world's most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections."
Some of the reasoning for this article in The Growers Solution is to inform the readers of The Growers Solution, but also because of the growing awareness of agriculture to the biological life in soil. This growing awareness in agriculture has caused a questioning about the heavy usage of fungicides in production agriculture and the effect of those fungicides on the microbes in the soil. This fact is discussed in The New York Times article.
THE ROLE OF PESTICIDES
As the C.D.C. works to limit the spread of drug-resistant C. auris, its investigators have been trying to answer the vexing question: Where in the world did it come from?
The first time doctors encountered C. auris was in the ear of a woman in Japan in 2009 (auris is Latin for ear). It seemed innocuous at the time, a cousin of common, easily treated fungal infections.
Three years later, it appeared in an unusual test result in the lab of Dr. Jacques Meis, a microbiologist in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was analyzing a bloodstream infection in 18 patients from four hospitals in India. Soon, new clusters of C. auris seemed to emerge with each passing month in different parts of the world.
The C.D.C. investigators theorized that C. auris started in Asia and spread across the globe. But when the agency compared the entire genome of auris samples from India and Pakistan, Venezuela, South Africa and Japan, it found that its origin was not a single place, and there was not a single auris strain.
The genome sequencing showed that there were four distinctive versions of the fungus, with differences so profound that they suggested that these strains had diverged thousands of years ago and emerged as resistant pathogens from harmless environmental strains in four different places at the same time.
"Somehow, it made a jump almost seemingly simultaneously, and seemed to spread and it is drug-resistant, which is really mind-boggling," Dr. Vallabhaneni said.
There are different theories as to what happened with C. auris. Dr. Meis, the Dutch researcher, said he believed that drug-resistant fungi were developing thanks to heavy use of fungicides on crops.
Dr. Meis became intrigued by resistant fungi when he heard about the case of a 63 year-old patient in the Netherlands who died in 2005 from a fungus called Aspergillus. It proved resistant to a front-line antifungal treatment called itraconazole. That drug is a virtual copy of the azole pesticides that are used to dust crops the world over and account for more than one-third of all fungicide sales.
A 2013 paper in Plos Pathogens said that it appeared to be no coincidence that drug-resistant Aspergillus was showing up in the environment where the azole fungicides were used. The fungus appeared in 12 percent of Dutch soil samples, for example, but also in "flower beds, compost, leaves, plant seeds, soil samples of tea gardens, paddy fields, hospital surroundings, and aerial samples of hospitals."
Dr. Meis visited the C.D.C. last summer to share research and theorize that the same thing is happening with C. auris, which is found in the soil: Azoles have created an environment so hostile that the fungi are evolving, with resistant strains surviving.
This is similar to concerns that resistant bacteria are growing because of excessive use of antibiotics in livestock for health and growth promotion. As with antibiotics in farm animals, azoles are used widely on crops.
"On everything-potatoes, beans, wheat, anything you can think of, tomatoes, onions," said Dr. Rhodes. the infectious disease specialist who worked on the London outbreak. "We are driving this with the use of anti fungicides on crops."
Dr. Chiller theorizes that C. auris may have benefited from the heavy use of fungicides. His idea is that C. auris actually has existed for thousands of years, hidden in the world's crevices, a not particularly aggressive bug. But as azoles began destroying more prevalent fungi, an opportunity arrived for C. auris to enter the breach, a germ that had the ability to readily resist fungicides now suitable for a world in which fungi less able to resist are under attack.
The mystery of C. auris’ emergence remains unsolved, and its origin seems, for the moment, to be less important than stopping its spread.
Anyone interested in the entire The New York Times article can contact their GMS sales representative or the Growers Chemical Corporation home office in Milan, Ohio.
This is an excerpt from the Spring Growers Solution (2020) written by Jim Halbeisen.
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