At a time when India, like the rest of the world, is still reeling under the effects of a one-year-old pandemic, it has emerged that the next one could be round the corner.
Researchers have found traces of a deadly hospital ‘superbug’, a multidrug-resistant organism, on remote sandy beaches of India which can cause the next deadly pandemic, India Today reported.
The study, published in the journal mBio on March 16, confirms a “landmark discovery”, where scientists have got evidence of ‘Candida auris’, also called C. auris — a superbug which can resist anti-fungal treatments.
A Delhi University team, led by Dr Anuradha Chowdhary, studied 48 samples of soil and water collected from eight places around Andaman Islands, including sandy beaches, rocky shores, tidal marshes, and mangrove swamps.
C. auris was isolated from two sites –a salt marsh wetland where there are no visitors and a beach with human activity.
According to Chowdhary, C. auris from the beach were multi-drug resistant and closely related to strains seen in hospitals compared with the samples from the marshy wetland.
It’s however not conclusive that C. auris naturally lives on the Andaman Islands, or that it originated there, Live Science reported. The possibility of the microbe having been introduced by visitors at the beach site can’t be ruled out.
