A pediatric patient in a South Carolina hospital has died from a rare brain-eating amoeba.
The Prisma Health Children’s Hospital patient recently died after contracting Naegleria fowleri, which infects the brain and destroys tissue, Pediatric Infectious Disease Physician Anna Kathryn Burch said Tuesday.
The hospital declined to share more details about the patient, and officials have not said where the infection occurred. State authorities say there is no broader risk to the public.
A case of Naegleria fowleri was confirmed in South Carolina during the week of July 7, according to the state’s Department of Public Health. There have been only 167 reported cases of the infection in the US between 1962 and 2024, the CDC reports. However, just four people have survived the infection.
Very common since fowleri itself is very common and is generally not geared to actually fight your immune system in any way(since it’s an organism where any entry into a body is essentially an evolutionary dead end). In the South that is. Anywhere water doesn’t freeze over the winter because it can’t survive that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014489418300705 - 98 percent seropositive here. Hopefully that resolves some of your fears because as you can see, people interact with it a lot without ill effects. Frankly simple drowning should be a much bigger concern.
What’s more scary is how many people in endemic areas in third world countries are seropositive for rabies
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11798433/ 11 percent here in Brazilian indigenous communities for those who have not been vaccinated. That’s a lot of close calls
I had no idea you could even be seropositive for rabies without having it!
Yeah once it shows clinical symptoms it’s always fatal, but there are subclinical infections. We just don’t know how many and in what proportion.