Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former

health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical

health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health

question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.

For future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, producer of public health on call.

Today, our topic is an infectious disease other than COVID.

It's called Candida Oris, a type of yeast that is causing a wave of serious hospital-acquired infections

across the country. Dr. Josh Sharfstein speaks to Dr. Tara Palmore, the hospital epidemiologist

at the George Washington University Hospital, and a professor of medicine at the George Washington

School of Medicine. Let's listen. Dr. Palmore, thank you so much for coming on to public health on call to talk about an infectious disease story that is not the pandemic.

It's hiding behind some of those headlines.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So we're talking about Candida Oras. Can you tell us what Candida oris is?

Candida oris is a species of candida.

Candida are yeast, which are normal organisms that are in or on our bodies and are really ubiquitous.

Candida oris, it was identified first in 2009, and within a few years, became a hospital

pathogen, became a hospital-acquired organism.

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, put out a call for cases and published their first case series of the first seven cases in the United States.

And after that, Canada Orris became what we would call as emerging pathogen in hospitals and has become increasingly a hospital-acquired

...