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Child dies from brain-eating amoeba in South Carolina (www.independent.co.uk)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/health@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I mean they've always been active in the South. Any warm unchlorinated water means they'll be there eating bacteria. They just very rarely accidentally find themselves in your brain and start eating that. They're so common that the amount of people who have antibodies against them from finding their way into some random orifice is very high.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    It is one of my biggest semi-irrational fears but I had never considered that you could have antibodies for them.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Would that mean we could vaccinate for them?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Opposite actually. PAM is because they end up locked behind the blood brain barrier where the really effective immune cells can't get to them. A vaccination is pointless because they are already easily destroyed by immune cells otherwise. It's like accidentally wandering into a bank vault full of Cheetos while they were delivering more Cheetos and getting yourself locked in for fowleri. A poor situation for them and a poor situation for the Cheeto Bank.

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