6 Tragedies In One Year: Brain-Eating Amoeba Deaths On Increase

Six people in the US have been killed by an amoeba living in lakes and entering the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds. Encounters with the bug, called Naegleria fowleri brain-eating amoeba, are extremely rare but the rise in cases so far this year has worried health officials, who predict more cases in the future.

Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illness for the Centres For Disease Control& Prevention has said,

“This is definitely something we need to track. This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.”

From 1995 to 2004 the bug, which sounds like something out of a horror movie, killed 23 people in the US.

This year saw health officials notice a spike with six cases – three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. Since the bug’s discovery in Australia in the 60’s, the CDC has only known of several hundred cases world wide.

David Evans, who lost his 14-year-old son, Aaron to the bug said at first it seemed like his son was only suffering from a headache.

“We didn’t know. And here I am. I come home and I’m burying him.”

Doctors did more tests and discovered that Aaron had probably picked up the amoeba a week before while swimming in Lake Havasu, a man-made lake on the Colorado River between Arizona and California.

Most infections tend to be found in southern states in the US, but Naegleria lives almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs and even off dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.

When people wade through shallow water, they stir up the bottom and if they then allow water to shoot up their nose, the amoeba can then latch on to the olfactory nerve. It then destroys tissue as it makes its way up to the brain.