Prevention and control measures for Candida auris in health care facilities
- Candida auris is an emerging microorganism that belongs to the yeast category. Increasingly, it is being found as a pathogen causing nosocomial fungal infections.
- First identified in Japan in 2009 in a sample from a patient’s auditory canal (Satoh et al., 2009; ECDC, 2016; Rock, 2017), it has since been identified in up to 17 countries, spread across at least 5 continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas (CDC, 2017a; Schwartz and Hammond, 2017).
- C. auris, with a clonal strain, has caused outbreaks in many health care facilities, including some involving a large number of colonized or infected patients.
- Some particular characteristics of Candida auris are making world experts concerned about its propagation. As well as its ability to be transmitted at health care facilities and cause outbreaks, many strains demonstrate or quickly develop resistance to most antifungal agents commonly used to treat Candida infections, making it a major challenge to treatment and survival of infected individuals. In addition, there are difficulties precisely recognizing Candida auris using traditional lab methods, meaning that it is often incorrectly identified. This delay in confirming the strain can also have a major impact on treatment of infections, and on its transmission at health care facilities.
- This document sets out the recommendations of the Comité sur les infections nosocomiales du Québec (CINQ) on the main measures to be implemented for identifying Candida auris and preventing its transmission at Quebec health care facilities.
- This document’s recommendations were part of a review on the literature currently available about Candida auris. However, some recommendations are the result of a consensus of CINQ experts since no official recommendations or explicit applications were addressed in those documents. Since knowledge about this emerging new agent is constantly evolving, CINQ members will monitor the evolution of information about this and will be able to update these recommendations if important changes are published.