Shutterstock/Bigpixel Photo; Stephanie Rossow/CDC
IN THE month the first lockdown began in England, the number of people seeking emergency hospital treatment . It wasn’t that fewer people needed urgent care, but that many feared catching coronavirus, according to doctors. Those concerns are understandable. While control measures have improved since, in May it was estimated that .
The problem of potentially deadly hospital-acquired infections isn’t restricted to the pandemic. Every year, end up with infections that can be more dangerous than their initial condition. The best known causes include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C. diff), often called superbugs for their ability to shrug off antibiotic treatments. A growing list of conditions, such as pneumonia, tuberculosis sepsis and gonorrhoea, are becoming harder to treat because of antibiotic resistance.
As the current pandemic makes painfully clear, bacteria aren’t the only microbes able to adapt at our expense. In the past few years, a new threat has been setting off alarm bells: treatment-resistant fungal infections. There have been outbreaks at hospitals around the world. Worryingly, 90 per cent of infections caused by the main culprit, Candida auris, are now resistant to one of our mainstay antifungal drugs.
This resistance is developing at an , according to a recent assessment, which warns that the problem isn’t just spreading in our hospitals, but also in fields, gardens and the very air we breathe. So how big is the problem? And what…
