Superbug has spread to two Collin County hospitals

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The CDC said it’s an ongoing outbreak and that additional infections have been identified since April.

DALLAS – Updated at 6:55pm with additional information.

US health officials say they now have evidence that an untreatable fungus has spread to two Collin County hospitals and a nursing home in Washington, DC.

Officials said Friday that there have been four deaths related to the fungus at two health care facilities in Collin County.

An outbreak of Candida auris was reported Thursday to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A small number of patients had invasive fungal infections that were immune to all three major classes of drugs. The CDC concluded that the new cases had spread.

In Washington, DC, a cohort of 101 cases of IBS in a nursing home for severely infected patients included three cases resistant to all three types of antifungal drugs. A group of 22 North Texas hospitals included two hospitals with this level of resistance. Facilities are not specified.

The state health department notified the WFAA on Friday that it occurred in Collin County.

Collin County Health Care Services said in a statement that there have been two cases of systemic resistance and one death. There have been seven cases of shinokandin resistance and three deaths.

The Collin County Department of State said the first reported case of drug-resistant C. auris was received on January 25, 2021. Several health consultations were sent to hospitals and health care facilities in early 2021 where cases were identified. The department is working with the state Department of Health and the CDC to control the spread.

Those cases were seen from January to April. Of the five people who completely resisted treatment, three died – Texas patients and one in Washington.

“This is the first time we’re starting to see a resistance group” in which patients seem to be getting infections from each other, said Dr. Megan Lyman of the CDC.

Lyman said that both have an ongoing outbreak and that additional infections have been identified since April. But these added numbers have not been reported.

The fungus, Candida auris, is a harmful form of yeast that is dangerous to hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems. It is most deadly when it enters the bloodstream, heart, or brain. Outbreaks in healthcare facilities have been triggered when the fungus is spread through patient contact or on contaminated surfaces.

How does it spread? A healthy person can be a carrier without knowing it, according to Dr. Floyd Wormley, a professor at Texas Christian University.

“You can carry it to hospitals, you can carry it if you are a doctor or a nurse working with a patient,” he said. “You can contaminate surfaces in the hospital.”

Ordinary antiseptics will not always work against fungi; You should use detergents and disinfectants that have been proven to kill this type of fungus.

“Once you determine that an organism is in the environment, you can take effective action to remove, get rid of, or push down the contamination,” Warmali said. “But the hard part is knowing it’s there.”

The fungi cause disease but primarily for people with severely weakened immune systems.

“So I would say most of the time it’s not a huge concern, it’s not a super prevalent event, all of a sudden you’re going to start seeing it all over Texas and across the country,” Wormley said. “But it’s something that once you identify it in your area, you might want to research it just to make sure you’re okay.”

Health officials have sounded alarms for years about superbugs after seeing an infection in which commonly used drugs had little effect. In 2019, doctors diagnosed three cases in New York that were also resistant to a class of drugs called echinocandins, which were considered the last line of defense.

In those cases, there was no evidence of infection spreading from one patient to another – the scientists concluded that drug resistance formed during treatment.

Investigators reviewed medical records and found no evidence of previous antifungal use among patients in those groups. Health officials say that means they pass from person to person.

The Texas Department of Health Services shared a statement:

“DSHS issued a health advisory on March 16 notifying health care providers across the state of two resistant Candida auris infections from January and February and sharing infection control best practices. Since then, no additional resistant cases have been identified in Texas. DSHS has worked with Collin County Health Care Services, the local health department that is leading the investigation, to provide support, including visits to assess infection control practices and to test people who may have been exposed.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article said that they were two hospitals in the Dallas, not the “Dallas area.”

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