ShareThisLike many girls her age, Liza Hollingsworth loved animals, art, music and sports. At age 10, the young honor student from Mount Pleasant, S.C., had an exciting life ahead of her.
But in June, just three days after complaining of a headache, Hollingsworth was dead. Her killer was a tiny single-celled organism with a morbid attraction to the human brain.
Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) is a rare, but almost always fatal disease caused by a free-living amoeba commonly found in warm water lakes and ponds in the southern United States. The amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, enters the human body through the nose or sometimes the ear. Within days, the victim suffers severe headaches, nausea, slips into a coma and then dies.
The illness is difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat. Another frightening aspect of the amoeba is its prevalence in freshwater ponds and lakes throughout Florida.
Health department officials say the cost of testing for the amoeba's presence is prohibitive, but also unnecessary since it probably exists in nearly every closed, untreated body of freshwater.
The only way to ensure protection is to avoid swimming in waters that have the amoeba.
Charles Vogt, environmental specialist with the Health Department of Indian River County, Fla., says swimming in areas with constantly circulating water is one precaution.
"Basically the organism likes to stay in the surface mud layer in a spot where there isn't a lot of changeover in the water," Vogt said. "Swimming lakes that have a huge changeover and keep the water moving and diluted greatly reduces the possibility of an infection."
Vogt said that does not mean it won't occur, but people can prevent themselves from becoming infected.
"It really shows up when it's hot, so steer clear of swimming in these places when it's really hot," he said.
N. fowleri infects its host when water enters the nose. The amoeba then migrates along the olfactory nerve into the brain. Once there, it multiplies and actually feeds on brain cells killing them quickly, and affecting the entire central nervous system.
Symptoms include loss of smell followed by severe headaches, vomiting and fever until rapid onset of coma and then death.
The scientific community uses the word "rare" to describe the incidence of infection by this tiny pathogenic organism, but super rare is probably the more appropriate term. Although first identified in 1965 in Australia, U.S. cases have been logged as early as 1937. Since then, 125 cases have been reported.
Unfortunately, because of the nature of its attack, N. fowleri is almost always fatal. Of the 125 cases reported, 124 resulted in death.
In 2007, six cases of PAM in the United States were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including three from Florida. All six patients died. In 2009, the one U.S. death reported was from Florida.
The problem with treatment of the disease is its diagnosis. Symptoms of PAM are similar to viral meningitis or bacterial meningitis, also serious illnesses, but with much better success rates for treatment. PAM requires visual inspection of the spinocerebral fluid to determine presence of the amoebae.
(Contact Ed Killer of The Stuart News in Florida at XX(at)xxx.com.)
