By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-04-01 22:19:16 | Updated at 2025-04-04 05:26:06
2 days ago
A deadly fungus is spreading like crazy across the United States, sickening and killing hospital patients — and the federal response has been ineffectual at best.
It’s been found in 29 states since 2016, including New York, and the increase in affected patients is soaring year by year, the American Journal of Infection Control has found.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the drug-resistant Candida auris fungus an “urgent” threat, but talk is cheap. The agency is largely to blame for its rapid spread.
It’s a textbook example of a federal agency crying out for the Trump administration’s reform.
A shockingly high number of those who contract this hospital-based germ — between 30% and 60% — die. To put that in perspective, the case fatality rate of COVID-19 is 1.1%.
In 2024, the CDC reported 4,514 cases of C. auris infection in patients of all ages — nine times larger than that seen in the measles outbreak that has drawn significant public concern.
Leftists are moaning that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Tuesday job cuts, which included 2,400 CDC staffers, will imperil our health.
Nonsense: The agency, more fittingly called the Centers for Disaster and Confusion, has fallen far short of its core mission of stopping the spread of contagious diseases.
But by fighting this dangerous new infection, Kennedy can get the agency back on track.
Here’s your to-do list, Mr. Secretary: Prioritize health over political correctness, opt for transparency over secrecy, and deploy new technologies.
First, put a stop to woke distractions.
In 2021, while C. auris cases soared by 500%, the CDC was busy scolding health-care workers about gender-specific terms like “mother” and “father” and stigmatizing words like “smoker” and “prisoner.”
Ridiculous. Cutting the CDC’s language police won’t harm our health a bit.
Next, provide transparency.
Not just price transparency, Republicans’ favorite cure-all, but information transparency. “Bad care is a bad deal at any price,” says Leah Binder of patient-safety watchdog Leapfrog.
Once C. auris invades a hospital, it clings to furniture, ceiling tiles, curtains, mattresses and equipment like blood-pressure monitors and wheelchairs.
When patients are exposed to the fungus it attaches to their skin — and it’s virtually impossible to get rid of it. A small number develop life-threatening infections, but many more become carriers indefinitely.
If they’re later admitted to another hospital, they shed the fungus there, unknowingly spreading it.
You don’t want to be treated in a hospital struggling with this contagion.
But the CDC hides which hospitals have it — protecting the hospital’s reputation, but not stopping the spread.
In 2022, when the fungus invaded a Las Vegas hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit through contaminated echocardiogram equipment, a newborn died.
But the CDC only revealed the details a year later — in a report that referred to the outbreak site as “Hospital A.”
If you’re about to give birth, you need to know whether the hospital you’re planning to use is battling C. auris.
That “Hospital A” jargon is no exception. The CDC never identifies hospitals or nursing facilities battling any type of infection. That’s unfair to the public.
Finally, the CDC must join us in the 21st century. The agency’s infection-control guidance for hospitals is straight out of the 1950s.
It recommends using “EPA-approved detergents” — known to be ineffective against C. auris — and discusses changing water in buckets and laundering mop heads.
No mention of new technologies that can continuously and nontoxically decontaminate rooms.
Peer-reviewed medical journals, the gold standard, have demonstrated cutting-edge methods of ridding hospital rooms of C. auris. For example, dry hydrogen peroxide emitted through the HVAC system reduced fungal contamination in a Florida hospital’s burn unit by 93%.
A Las Vegas hospital used the method to reduce C. auris contamination on surfaces from 70% to just 17%, reducing the risk that patients will pick it up.
Far-UV light can also destroy hospital infection germs without posing any risk to human skin and eyes, according to data published just last month.
But the CDC is suspicious of solutions coming from the for-profit world, and the agency’s website and hospital guidelines reflect little awareness of what is technically possible.
No one has suffered more from the agency’s backward thinking than our schoolchildren.
During the COVID pandemic, numerous technologies could have been employed to get schools up and running relatively virus-free.
Instead, the CDC gave school administrators wacky, pointless advice to open the windows and keep desks six feet apart.
The public deserves a CDC that can provide up-to-date scientific guidance.
Mr. Secretary, this is your roadmap. The CDC maintains hundreds of projects that have nothing to do with stopping infectious disease.
Slash them and fortify the CDC to battle deadly contagions. Our lives could depend on it.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.
