Last month, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change charted global temperatures to be 1.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and on a destructive trajectory to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the early 2030s. This intersects surprisingly with another piece of news: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sounding the alarm on a sometimes deadly pathogenic yeast that’s spreading rapidly in health care facilities.
Researchers increasingly believe that the yeast, Candida auris, is the first pathogenic fungus to arise from global warming. Its growing microbial footprint will test how prepared the world is for the disease pressures we face from climate change.
In 2022, there were nearly 2,400 C. auris infections in 28 states, with Nevada and California reporting the highest numbers. Clinical cases have increased every year since 2016. The 2022 count is almost 40 times what amounted over a three-year span starting in 2013, the year of the first known case in the United States. (The fungus was first discovered in any human in 2009, when doctors recovered it from a Japanese woman’s ear and named it accordingly — auris is Latin for ear).
