Patient dies from brain-eating amoeba in S.C. children’s hospital

A patient has died after being exposed to a brain-eating amoeba in South Carolina, doctors at a children’s hospital in Columbia said Tuesday.

The patient, who has not been identified, was likely exposed to Naegleria fowleri at Lake Murray, just outside Columbia, in early July, according to the South Carolina Department of Public Health.

N. fowleri, a one-celled organism that thrives in warm freshwater lakes, rivers and hot springs, is often called the “brain-eating ameba” because it can infect the brain and destroy brain tissue, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) — a brain infection that occurs when water containing the amoeba goes up the nose into the brain — is very rare but often fatal.

On Tuesday, officials with the Prisma Health Children’s Hospital-Midlands confirmed the patient died from the infection, which Dr. Anna-Kathryn Burch, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the hospital, called “devastating.”

“Greater than 97% of cases that have occurred since the ’60s have been fatal,” Burch said at the briefing, according to CBS News.

Per the CDC, fewer than 10 people a year in the U.S. contract PAM — but nearly all of them die from the infection.

Last month, a 71-year-old Texas woman died from the brain-eating amoeba after flushing her sinuses with tap water, health officials said.

In New York, the last known case was in 2016, when a 19-year-old woman from Kingston died at a local hospital days after contracting the amoeba while swimming in a Maryland river.

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