VENEZIA – The first death in Veneto from Candida Auris triggers the maximum alert against the risk of other infections at the Angelo hospital in Mestre.
The victim is a man over 70, returning from a trip to Kenya. He had been hospitalized in an emergency at the beginning of July, as soon as he returned to Italy, but the fungus with a mortality rate of 30 to 70% left him no way out. And it is a new emergency on the health front, in a region with Covid numbers rising like the national trend and with the nightmare of the spread of monkeypox.
“The infection of Candida is worrying because it is a highly pathogenic fungus,” he told Nuova Venezia Sandro Panese, Director of the Infectious Diseases Operating Unit. “Previous epidemics have taught that it is a difficult germ to eradicate. As a hospital we have taken all precautionary measures with swabs to the environment and to people to understand if it has spread. Fortunately, the swabs have all given negative results.”
All the necessary checks and precautions were then taken in the ward to avoid uncontrolled spread. “It can colonize people’s skin and contaminate surfaces and the environment. In Liguria it took them two years to get rid of it “, the director of Microbiology dell’Angelo explained to Corriere del Veneto. Claudio Scarparo.
The seventy-year-old, who had just arrived at the hospital, was in alarming conditions, as immediately specified by the USL 3 of Venice. Moreover, during his stay in Kenya he had felt ill from an attack of kidney stones and there he had turned to a private clinic for treatment. He almost certainly contracted Candida Auris in there. When the family members realized that his conditions continued to deteriorate, they managed to obtain a transfer to Mestre.
After hospitalization at the Angelo and the discovery of the infection, first in Geriatrics and then in Infectious diseases, the USL 3 swabbed the staff and other patients of the wards. Tracing was done on dozens of people: not only direct contacts but also indirect ones.