Drug-Resistant Candida auris Fungus Now Confirmed in 23 States, CDC Data Shows

Fungus keeps expanding its footprint

Candida auris, a drug-resistant fungus first flagged as a serious public health threat years ago, has been confirmed in 23 states as of the latest data cited by Fox 96.9 (WWWX-FM) in Appleton, Wisconsin. Wisconsin is among the states now on that list.

The fungus has proven difficult to contain in 2026 despite ongoing efforts by hospitals and public health agencies to stop its spread, according to the report, which cites new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Who's actually at risk

Candida auris is not a threat to the general public in the way a flu outbreak might be. It spreads primarily in health care settings, hospitals, nursing homes, and long-term care facilities, where it clings to surfaces, medical equipment, and skin.

The people most at risk are already sick or medically fragile: patients on ventilators, those with feeding tubes or central lines, people who've had recent surgery, and residents of long-term care facilities with weakened immune systems. Healthy adults going about their daily lives are not the target population.

Public health officials have stressed for years that Candida auris is a hospital-acquired infection risk, not a community-spread pandemic threat like COVID-19. The danger is concentrated where sick, immunocompromised patients are clustered together and share equipment and staff.

Why it's so hard to kill

What makes Candida auris alarming is its resistance to standard antifungal treatments. Many strains don't respond to the drugs doctors normally use to treat fungal infections, leaving fewer options when it does invade a patient's bloodstream, wounds, or ears.

It also survives on surfaces longer than many other pathogens and can resist standard hospital disinfectants, which is part of why it keeps popping up in new states and new facilities despite infection-control efforts.

For patients who develop invasive infections, meaning the fungus gets into the bloodstream or organs rather than just colonizing the skin, mortality rates have historically been high in already-vulnerable populations, though exact fatality figures vary by outbreak and patient population and were not specified in the available CDC data cited here.

The spread question nobody's fully answered

The 23-state confirmation depends on hospitals and labs actually testing for it and reporting results up the chain to state health departments and the CDC. The true spread could be undercounted in states with less aggressive surveillance, or it could reflect genuine geographic expansion as the fungus moves between facilities via transferred patients and traveling health care workers.

The number of confirmed states climbing is a real trend worth watching. The Fox 96.9 report doesn't break out state-by-state case counts or specify which additional states beyond Wisconsin were newly added to the list, which limits how precisely the public can gauge the pace of spread.

What happens next

Hospitals in affected states are expected to continue enhanced screening protocols, isolating colonized patients and using specialized cleaning agents shown to be effective against the fungus. The CDC has previously recommended dedicated equipment for infected patients and rigorous hand hygiene as baseline defenses.

The open question going forward is whether the current 23-state footprint keeps expanding through the rest of 2026, and whether any state health departments will release detailed case counts and mortality data that would let the public assess the actual severity rather than just the geographic spread.