Abstract
Introduction: Candida auris has emerged as a serious threat of public health and caused global epidemic due to multi-drug resistance, remarkable transmissibility and high mortality. Here, we report the first detected case of C. auris in Zhejiang , China.
Case Presentation: A 60-year-old male patient with severe pneumonia who had been previously treated in multiple hospitals in Nanjing before being transferred to the ICU at Jinhua Hospital of Zhejiang University. A yeast isolated from sputum cultures was identified as C. auris by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS), and subjected to antifungal susceptibility tests , whole genome sequencing (WGS) and phylogenetic analysis. The isolate exhibited high resistance to fluconazole only and belonged to the genetic Clade I. Due to the patient's condition worsened, the family eventually gave up treatment. Considering the patient's clinical history, we suspect that colonization or infection had already occurred in the previous hospital setting.
Conclusions: C. auris is an invasive fungal pathogen that can cause serious infection. MALDI-TOF MS can be used to detect C. auris accurately and timely. Patients are at a higher risk of acquiring C. auris infection due to their long stay in the intensive care unit (ICU) and multiple underlying diseases, so admission screening and preventive control measures are essential to prevent the spread of C. auris outbreaks.
Keywords
severe pneumonia Antifungal Susceptibility MALDI-TOF MS Candida auris
Copyright
© 2024, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.