The Strange and Curious Case of the Deadly Superbug Yeast

A pathogen that resists almost all of the drugs developed to treat or kill it is moving rapidly across the world, and public health experts are stymied how to stop it. It’s a yeast, a new variety of an organism so common that it’s used as one of the basic tools of lab science, transformed into an infection so disturbing that one lead researcher called it “more infectious than Ebola” at an international conference last week. As the foes continue to evolve, medicine needs both new tech, and surprisingly old techniques “This bug is the most difficult we’ve ever seen,” says Dr. Tom Chiller, the chief of mycotic diseases at the CDC, who made the Ebola remark at the 20th Congress of the International Society for Human and Animal Mycology in Amsterdam. The accepted narrative of new diseases is that they always take us by surprise The story begins in 2009, when a 70-year-old woman already in a hospital in Tokyo developed a stubborn, oozing ear infection. Microbiologists Kazuo Satoh and Koichi Makimura named it for the Latin word for “ear.” That story also would have ended in 2009—new species, new nomenclature, another entry in a textbook—except for an unnerving fact.