We Made This

I read the New York Times article about the latest medical scourge, Candida auris, with surprising equanimity, if I do say so myself. It's a drug-resistant fungal disease I've never heard of — though it's been on public health officials' radar since about 2010 — that can kill you and leave the room you died in infected down to the studs. Oh, ho-hum, just another moment in the handbasket.

I don't mean to be so cavalier, but there's a lot going on these days.

But then I got this part:

CDC 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.

Meis, the Dutch researcher, said he believed that drug-resistant fungi were developing thanks to heavy use of fungicides on crops.... [One] front-line antifungal treatment called itraconazole...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.

So get that: it's not only drug-resistant, it's not an "it" exactly but four different "it"s that evolved almost simultaneously from previously harmless fungi because we were busy trying to control other fungi on our food crops. We made this killer.