Brain-Eating Amoeba Lurks In Lakes; 6 Dead

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PHOENIX — It sounds like science fiction, but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain, where it feeds until you die.
Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are rare, six boys or young men have been killed this year. The spike concerns health officials, and they are predicting more cases.
"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational-waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"This is a heat-loving amoeba," Beach said. "As water temperatures go up, it does better. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."
According to the CDC, the amoeba, Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL-erh-eye), killed 23 people in the United States from 1995 to 2004. Health officials this year have recorded six cases: three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. Only several hundred cases worldwide are known to have occurred since the amoeba's discovery in Australia in the 1960s.
In Arizona, David Evans said nobody knew his son, Aaron, 14, was infected until after he died Sept. 17. The teen seemed to have nothing more than a headache.
"We didn't know," Evans said. "And here I am: I come home and I'm burying him."
After more tests, doctors said the teen probably picked up the amoeba a week earlier while swimming in the balmy shallows of Lake Havasu, a popular man-made lake on the Colorado River straddling the Arizona-California border.
Although infections tend to be found in Southern states, the amoeba lives almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.
Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.
The amoeba destroys...