Forget bedbugs and cockroaches — NYC is battling “superbugs” that can’t easily be quashed.
Candida auris, for one, survives on surfaces even after cleaning, frequently evades standard antifungal treatments and can trigger fatal bloodstream infections.
New York has seen a steady increase in Candida auris cases since the state officially detected the dangerous fungus in 2016. Statewide last year, there were 623 clinical cases (those who became sick from Candida auris) and 849 surveillance cases (those who tested positive but weren’t ill).
A study last year determined that the NYC/New Jersey metro area accounts for nearly 20% of the US’s Candida auris cases, with researchers pinpointing high-volume travel and trade with South Asia as the source of the surge.
Candida auris isn’t the only savage superbug waging germ warfare in NYC — medical experts warn that overuse of antibiotics is fueling a rise in “nightmare bacteria” that have developed resistance to most known drugs.
“When somebody has a viral illness, they have a respiratory cold, [an] antibiotic [will] have zero benefit to them, but will have more potential toxicity, both in terms of side effects and reactions, but also in the development of resistance,” Dr. Aaron Glatt, professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai South Nassau, told The Post.
“The entire opportunity here is for people to use the antibiotics appropriately.”
Antibiotics should be used to treat or prevent bacterial infections such as strep throat, urinary tract infections and bacterial pneumonia.
They shouldn’t be used to address viral infections like colds, flu, COVID-19 or most sore throats because they are ineffective against these ailments and contribute to antibiotic resistance.
Bacteria primarily develop antibiotic resistance through natural genetic mutations. These resistant strains then spread their genetic material to other bacteria.
Last fall, the World Health Organization noted that 1 in 6 bacterial infections were resistant to common antibiotic treatments. In fact, the agency reported that antibiotic resistance rose by an average of 5% to 15% annually between 2018 and 2023.
This problem snowballed during the COVID-19 pandemic because many patients with mild to moderate cases of the coronavirus unnecessarily received antibiotics.
“It’s a combination of patients requesting … antibiotics when they don’t need them,” Glatt said. “It’s also incumbent upon physicians to say, ‘No, this disease is not treated with an antibiotic.’”
There is some reassuring news — though Candida auris has become more prevalent in New York, the fungus primarily spreads within healthcare facilities like nursing homes and hospitals.
“It is not something that is of great concern to the typical person on the street,” Glatt said, “but it is especially concerning for patients from nursing homes and … patients who receive multiple antibiotics and are very sick themselves and they’re immunocompromised.”
Encouragingly, new drugs have shown effectiveness against certain types of resistant bacteria, such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae.
Federal bipartisan legislation — first proposed in 2020 and reintroduced last month — aims to replenish the antibiotic pipeline to continue the battle against nightmare bacteria.
The Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Upsurging Resistance (PASTEUR) Act would ensure payments to pharmaceutical companies based on the value and innovation of their new antibiotics instead of the number of drugs they sell.
This Netflix-like “subscription” model is designed to stabilize the market and encourage research.
“This Netflix model says the government will pay the pharmaceutical [companies] a flat fee for the access to these antibiotics, no matter how much is used or not,” Glatt explained.
“This way, the pharmaceutical industry would be adequately reimbursed with [research and development] that they do,” he continued, “and at the same time, if the drug gets used a lot, it won’t be as expensive.”
