Candida auris presents ongoing challenges for Nevada’s healthcare facilities. In 2025, the Silver State on its own accounted for 22% of the nation’s nearly 7,200 C. auris cases — reporting 1,605 infections to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and outpacing California’s roughly 1,550 cases and Texas’ 830. When adjusted for population, Nevada logged 20 times more cases per capita than its coastal neighbor.

A new UNLV-led study found that testing wastewater from hospital sewer lines can detect drug-resistant strains of C. auris months before patients begin showing symptoms, offering health officials an earlier warning of potentially deadly outbreaks.

Every hospital has drains. Sinks, toilets, floor gullies in procedure rooms, the slow trickle from IV lines flushed between patients. For years, all of that went down the pipes and nobody thought much about it. But researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas have spent the better part of four years paying very close attention to what hospitals are washing away, and what they’ve found in Southern Nevada’s sewer lines is, by any measure, alarming: a drug-resistant killer fungus circulating through healthcare facilities months before a single patient tests positive.

UNLV-led research team uses wastewater surveillance to suss out C. auris strains with greater precision, paving way for potential new therapeutic development

Wastewater surveillance became a popular choice among public health officials looking to track rapid virus mutations and spread patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. But what if there was a way to detect emerging virus pathogens even faster — or to even sniff out new variants possibly before patients even realize they’re ill? A new UNLV-led study is moving that dream one step closer to reality by pairing wastewater sample surveillance with artificial intelligence. The results appear in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications.

UNLV researchers are now using the help of AI to look at wastewater samples for viruses before people experience symptoms.

Pairing artificial intelligence (AI) with wastewater surveillance may enable public health authorities to identify emerging viruses earlier than current methods, according to a new study led by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). The findings were published in Nature Communications.

A new study and new research formulated at UNLV is leading the way to track rapid virus mutations and spread patterns, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.