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.