Abstract
In December 2020, Candida auris emerged in Brazil in the city of Salvador. The first two C. auris colonized patients were in the same COVID-19 intensive care unit. Antifungal susceptibility testing showed low minimal inhibitory concentrations of 1 µg/mL, 2 µg/mL, 0.03 µg/L, and 0.06 µg/mL for amphotericin B, fluconazole, voriconazole, and anidulafungin, respectively. Microsatellite typing revealed that the strains are clonal and belong to the South Asian clade C. auris. The travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic and the absence of travel history among the colonized patients lead to the hypothesis that this species was introduced several months before the recognition of the first case and/or emerged locally in the coastline Salvador area.
Highlights
After the emergence of Candida auris in Venezuela [1], the Pan American HealthOrganization recommended to the Member States that early detection and notification were necessary to enable the implementation of appropriate measures to prevent and control spread in communities and health care services in the Americas [2]
In March 2017, a task force headed by the Brazilian National Sanitary Surveillance Agency (NSSA) released a document to warn and provide guidance to clinical laboratories and hospital infection control teams (HICT) regarding the emergence of Candida auris [3]
The NSSA document recommended the notification and shipment of any strain with phenotypical characteristics of C. auris to regional reference laboratories for definitive species identification by MALDITOF mass spectrometry and/or by ITS rDNA sequence analysis [3,4]. It was only in December 2020 that the first cultures from patients hospitalized in a tertiary 500-bed hospital from the coastline city of Salvador (Bahia State, Brazil; 12.9777◦ S, 38.5016◦ W; ~3 million inhabitants) showed the growth of yeasts identified as C. auris
Summary
After the emergence of Candida auris in Venezuela [1], the Pan American HealthOrganization recommended to the Member States that early detection and notification were necessary to enable the implementation of appropriate measures to prevent and control spread in communities and health care services in the Americas [2]. The NSSA document recommended the notification and shipment of any strain with phenotypical characteristics of C. auris to regional reference laboratories for definitive species identification by MALDITOF mass spectrometry and/or by ITS rDNA sequence analysis [3,4]. It was only in December 2020 that the first cultures from patients hospitalized in a tertiary 500-bed hospital from the coastline city of Salvador (Bahia State, Brazil; 12.9777◦ S, 38.5016◦ W; ~3 million inhabitants) showed the growth of yeasts identified as C. auris
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