This Deadly Drug-Resistant Fungus Can Lurk in Your Skin. Scientists Just Discovered How

The fungus Candida auris is one of the scarier emerging diseases out there, but scientists may have just uncovered a key secret to its survival that could allow us to fight back. Researchers at the University of California-San Francisco studied how the fungal pathogen behaved on the skin of mice. Compared to other related fungi, C. auris triggered a distinct response from the skin’s immune cells, they found—one that enabled it to easily hunker down in hair follicles. The discovery could lead to new treatments that can clear the fungus from our skin before it becomes a life-threatening problem, the researchers say. “These results suggest that C. auris exploits a distinctive immune axis to persist,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published last week in the journal Science. Doctors in Japan first discovered C. auris inside a person’s ear in 2009. Since then, it’s become one of the most urgent superbug threats in the world, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fungus is uniquely adept at evolving resistance to the most common medications used to treat fungal infections; some strains have even been pan-resistant to every type of antifungal we have avai