Enlarge / The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters stands in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg )

The tally of COVID-19 cases linked to a conference of disease detectives hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April has reached at least 181, the agency reported .

Roughly 1,800 gathered in person for this year's annual Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Conference, which was held on April 24 to 27 in a hotel conference facility in Atlanta where the CDC's headquarters are located. It was the first time the 70-year-old conference had in-person attendees since 2019. The CDC agency estimates an additional 400 attended virtually this year.

By the last day of the event, a number of in-person attendees had reported testing positive for COVID-19, causing conference organizers to warn attendees and make changes to reduce the chance of further spread. That reportedly included canceling an in-person training and offering to extend the hotel stays of sick attendees who needed to isolate.

Enlarge / This 2006 image depicts two sides of a Petri dish (reverse L, front R) growing a filamentous colony of Fusarium solani , the potential fungal pathogen behind the outbreak. (credit: CDC/ Mark Lindsley, Sc.D. D(ABMM), Lynette Benjamin, Shirley McClinton )

A second person in the US has died in an outbreak of fungal meningitis linked to surgeries in Mexico that involved epidural anesthesia. While the case count is now up to 18, more than 200 others across 25 states may have also been exposed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in an outbreak update Wednesday .

So far, the outbreak among US patients spans 224 people, with 206 potentially exposed and under investigation, nine suspected cases, and nine probable cases. Two of the patients with probable cases have died.

Last week, the CDC released a travel advisory and a health alert to clinicians about the cases. At the time, health authorities had identified only five cases, all Texas residents , one of whom had died. An update Wednesday from Texas health officials said that they have since identified two more cases, bringing the state's total to seven. All seven cases were hospitalized, but the officials are still reporting only one death in Texas.

Enlarge / A Trichophyton indotineae infection on the back of an Indian man. (credit: Uhrlaß, S. et al. Journal of Fungi )

A dermatologist in New York City has reported the country's first known cases of highly contagious ringworm infections that are resistant to common anti-fungal treatments—and caused by a newly emerging fungus that is rapidly outstripping other infectious fungi around the world.

In February, the dermatologist reported two cases to health officials in the state, which are described in a brief case study published Thursday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The two cases occurred a year apart and had no connection to each other. The first, from the summer of 2021, was in a 28-year-old pregnant woman who had no recent international travel history, no underlying medical conditions, and no known contact with anyone who had a similar rash. The case suggests that the fungus is quietly spreading in the community.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | UniversalImagesGroup )

Two more people have died and more details of horrifying eye infections are emerging in a nationwide outbreak linked to recalled eye drops from EzriCare and Delsam .

The death toll now stands at three, according to an outbreak update this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 68 people in 16 states have been infected with a rare, extensively drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain linked to the eye drops. In addition to the deaths, eight people have reported vision loss and four have had their eyeballs surgically removed (enucleation).

In a case report published this week in JAMA Ophthalmology, eye doctors at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, part of the University of Miami Health System, reported details of one case linked to the outbreak—a case in a 72-year-old man who has an ongoing infection in his right eye with vision loss, despite weeks of treatment with multiple antibiotics. When the man first sought treatment he reported pain in his right eye, which only had the ability to detect motion at the point, while his left eye had 20/20 vision. Doctors noted that the white of his right eye was entirely red and white blood cells had visibly pooled on his cornea and in the front inner chamber of his eye.

Enlarge / The director of Germany's National Reference Centre for Invasive Fungal Infections holds a petri dish containing the yeast Candida auris in a laboratory at Wuerzburg University. (credit: Getty | Nicolas Armer )

A deadly, drug-resistant fungus emerging in the US gained ground faster and picked up yet more drug resistance amid the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday.

The yeast Candida auris has been considered an "urgent threat"—the CDC's highest level of concern—since it was first reported in the US in 2016. The yeast lurks in health care settings and preys upon vulnerable patients, causing invasive infections with a fatality rate of between 30 to 60 percent.

In 2019, before the pandemic began, 17 states and Washington, DC, reported a total of 476 clinical cases. But in 2020, eight additional states reported cases for the first time, with the national clinical case count jumping 59 percent to 756. In 2021, 28 states were affected, with the clinical case count nearly doubling to 1,471. Asymptomatic cases detected through patient screening also jumped amid the pandemic, tripling from 1,310 cases in 2020 to 4,041 cases in 2021. The data appeared Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Maciej Luczniewski )

An alarming outbreak of extensively drug-resistant bacteria linked to eye drops has now sickened 68 people across 16 states, according to the latest update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . At least 16 people have been hospitalized, eight have lost vision, and four have had their eyeballs surgically removed (enucleation). One person has died, which was reported earlier.

The agency first released a health alert on the outbreak February 1. At that point, the outbreak had sickened 55 people in 12 states, with the one death reported in a Washington patient. In an update emailed to Ars on February 22, the CDC said the case count had reached 58, with five cases of vision loss and one enucleation.

The continued rise in cases and severe outcomes highlights the challenge of fighting the germ behind the outbreak, which is an extensively drug-resistant form of Pseudomonas aeruginosa . It has the unwieldy name of Verona Integron-mediated Metallo-β-lactamase (VIM) and Guiana-Extended Spectrum-β-Lactamase (GES)-producing carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa—or VIM-GES-CRPA, for short.

Enlarge / Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo speaks at a press conference in Rockledge, Florida, on August 3, 2022. (credit: Getty | SOPA Images )

At the height of the pandemic, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis repeatedly promoted COVID-19 vaccines , saying correctly that "they're safe, they're effective," and they "are saving lives." With hundreds of millions of shots given worldwide at this point, the extensive international data on the vaccines' safety and efficacy have strongly and consistently backed DeSantis' statements. The vaccines are estimated to have saved over 14 million lives in 185 countries just in the pandemic's first two years .

But amid growing rumors of a 2024 presidential bid, DeSantis reversed his stance on the life-saving shots, abruptly questioning their efficacy and making unfounded claims about their safety. In December, his about-face culminated in a call for a grand jury to investigate any alleged " crimes and wrongdoing " related to the vaccines.

Though the swing appears more aimed at scoring political points than protecting Floridians' health, DeSantis' hand-picked surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, has hewed closely to the governor's anti-vaccine rhetoric and health misinformation. Since his appointment as Florida's top doctor in late 2021, Ladapo has made false claims about vaccines, encouraged vaccine hesitancy, opposed masks, downplayed the health effects of COVID-19, and promoted ineffective COVID-19 treatments, such as ivermectin .

Enlarge / A microscope image of Streptococcus pyogenes , a common type of group A strep. (credit: Getty | BSIP )

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid a tall wave of respiratory viruses, health officials in Colorado and Minnesota documented an unusual spike in deadly, invasive infections from Streptococcus bacteria late last year, according to a study published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

The spike is yet another oddity of post-pandemic disease transmission, but one that points to a simple prevention strategy: flu shots.

The infections are invasive group A strep , or iGAS for short, which is caused by the same group of bacteria that cause relatively minor diseases, such as strep throat and scarlet fever. But iGAS occurs when the bacteria spread in the body and cause severe infection, such as necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease), toxic shock syndrome, or sepsis. These conditions can occur quickly and be deadly.