On September 7, 2013, a child (believed to be a 4-year old boy from Mississippi) died after contracting a rare, but deadly, brain-eating infection while visiting Louisiana. The boy may have come into contact with the waterborne brain-eating amoeba, known doctors as scientist as Naegleria fowleri, while playing on a plastic toy water slide at a home in St. Bernard’s Parish, Louisiana. According to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, water samples taken from the home the child was visiting tested positive for amoeba.
Unfortunately, this was not the only story of a child becoming infected with the brain-eating amoeba reported recently. On August 3, 2013, a 12-year old South Florida boy was knee-boarding in ditch water in Glades County, Florida when he contracted primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), the infection caused by the Naegleria fowleri amoeba, through his nose. Although antibiotics successfully fought off the infection, the boy suffered extensive brain damage, which left him on life support. The boy passed away on August 27, 2013. Finally, in July 2013, a 12-year old became ill after contracting the brain-eating parasite at a waterpark in Arkansas. However, she is one of the few individuals who managed to survive the infection after being treating with the experimental drug miltefosine, and was released from the hospital on September 11, 2013.
Despite the recent occurrences of infections, officials from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that only 128 people have been infected with PAM from 1962 to 2012. Of these 128 people, only two people in North America survived. In the future, this survival rate may increase as the CDC recently expanded doctors’ access to the experimental new drug, miltefosine, to treat deadly viruses, including PAM. Although used to treat another parasitic infection called leishmaniasis, and sometimes breast cancer, the drug was previously only used in emergency situations with permission from the FDA to treat PAM.