Brain Eating Amoeba Killing 12 Year Old's Brain

by Monica Davis

A parasitic, brain eating amoeba h infected a 12 year old Arkansas girl. The rare amoeba usally infects waters in the American South. 

The Arkansas Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that Kali Hardig contracted the disease after swimming in the Willow Springs Water Park in Little Rock, Ark.

Hardig’s mother, Traci, took her daughter to a local hospital one day after visiting the water park. “I couldn’t get her fever down,” Hardig told the Christian Post. “She started vomiting. She’d say her head hurt really bad. She cried, and she would just look at me and her eyes would just kind of roll.”   MOREHERE

There have been many cases of the amoeba in the south. An outbreak in Louisiana scared health authorities, because it came from people using sinus cleansing neti pots.

For sheer terror, “flesh-eating bacteria” can’t hold a candle to “brain-eating amoeba.” So it is little wonder that two recent fatalities in Louisiana in people who were killed by the amoeba after they used neti pots to flush their nasal passages with (apparently amoeba-contaminated) water has sinus sufferers in a panic. Until now, the only known cases of infection by the brain-eating parasite Naegleria fowleri have occurred when people swam in warm rivers, lakes, or other bodies of freshwater where the single-celled organism lives. MOREHERE 

The US spends almost $30 billion dollars every year to deliver clean, safe water to Americans. And even at that rate, much of our water is contaminated, and we don’t even know it. Many water systems aerate and chlorinate, but they don’t filter out contaminates.

In his 2011 book “The Big Thirst,” Charles Fishman reported that the U.S. spends about $29 billion every year to maintain its water and wastewater plants. The developing world doesn’t have this kind of money. MOREHERE

Dirty water kills over 30,000 people a week globally. In the United States, failing septic systems, agribusiness and industrial run off creates a crisis in clean water quality.  Water quality experts say, “Whether it’s the more-is-always-better approach of agricultural fertilizer application in the Central Valley or laissez-faire attitude towards septic system disposal and residential lawn over-application in Suffolk County, loading our waters with nitrogen and nitrates creates a health risk for humans and the ecosystem alike.”