Talk about a great big yuk, and a good reason to stay away from warm standing water.
Sept. 28, 2007, 10:50PM
Brain-eating amoeba blamed for 6 deaths in U.S.
By CHRIS KAHN
Associated Press
PHOENIX — It seemed like a headache, nothing more. But when painkillers and a trip to the emergency room didn't fix Aaron Evans, the 14-year-old asked his dad if he was going to die.
"No, no," David Evans remembers saying.
"We didn't know. And here I am: I come home and I'm burying him," the grieving father said.
What was bothering Aaron was a killer amoeba that enters the body through the nose and travels to the brain where it feeds, destroying brain tissue.
Doctors said the teen probably picked up the microscopic amoeba, Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL'-erh-eye), a week earlier while swimming in the balmy shallows of Lake Havasu near his home on the state's western border.
Such attacks are extremely rare, but they are usually fatal and six boys and young men have died this year in three states. Aaron Evans' death Sept. 17 was the most recent. Some health officials have put their communities on high alert, telling people to stay away from warm, standing water.
"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."
Amoeba is pervasive
According to the CDC, Naegleria killed 23 people in the United States from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials say they've noticed a spike in cases, with three in Florida, two in Texas and young Evans' death in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.
Naegleria lives almost everywhere — in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.
Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a cannonball off a cliff — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.
