The potentially deadly amoeba threatens thousands of people in Saint John the Baptist Parish. The brain-eating amoeba is a free-living, thermophilic excavate form of protist typically found in warm bodies of fresh water, such as ponds, lakes, rivers, and hot springs. It is also found in soil, near warm-water discharges of industrial plants, and in poorly chlorinated, or unchlorinated swimming pools, in an amoeboid or temporary flagellate stage. 

Louisiana Water Supply Contaminated With Brain-Eating Amoeba

What is this Brain-Eating Amoeba all about?

The brain-eating amoeba has caused quite a stir in the U.S, after infecting 2 kids this month alone. Naegleria Flowleri is the organism that kills human beings by getting into the nose and finding its way to the brain. It then feeds on the brain cells and causes a disease called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), which results in death.

Onset symptoms of infection can start from one to seven days after exposure. Initial symptoms include changes in taste and smell, headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, and a stiff neck. Secondary symptoms include confusion, hallucination, lack of attention, ataxia, and seizures. After the start of symptoms, the disease progresses rapidly over three to seven days, with death occurring usually from seven to fourteen days later, although it can take longer. In 2013, a man in Taiwan died twenty five days after being infected by Naegleria Flowleri.

How to Prevent this deadly disease?

1. Drinking this water is OK, but make sure water doesn’t go up your nose.

2. Use plenty of chlorine in the swimming pool. Or avoid playing in fresh water and go to the beach.

3. Use nose clips when swimming or diving.

4. Avoid nose irrigation and religious dip under water.

5. Don’t do submerging tricks and blowing nose bubbles under water.

6. If you do get into a lake or pond, keep your head above water and don’t stir up the sediment at the bottom.

7. Go to good, standard water parks.

Treatment

Amphotericin B is effective against N. fowleri in vitro, but the prognosis remains bleak for those who contract PAM, and survival remains less than 1%. On the basis of the in vitro evidence alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends treatment with amphotericin B for primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, but no evidence supports this treatment affecting outcome. 

Treatment combining miconazole, sulfadiazine, and tetracycline has shown limited success only when administered early in the course of an infection. An Iranian infant of five months was successfully treated with Amphotericin B and Rifampicin.

While miltefosine had therapeutic effects during an in vivo study in mice, chlorpromazine (Thorazine) showed to be the most effective substance – the authors concluded: “Chlorpromazine had the best therapeutic activity against N. fowleri in vitro and in vivo. Therefore, it may be a more useful therapeutic agent for the treatment of PAME than amphotericin B.”

Untimely diagnoses remain a very significant impediment to the successful treatment of infection, as most cases have only been discovered post mortem. Infection killed 121 people in the United States from 1937 through 2007.

This image is a work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, taken or made as part of an employee’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.