The 69-year-old Seattle woman had gone to her doctor for help with a nagging sinus infection and had been told to flush out her nasal cavities with water using a device sometimes called a neti pot, according to a case report in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Infectious disease doctors contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and they sent medicine for the rare condition, but the woman could not be saved. This single-celled organism is not to be confused with Naegleria fowleri, another brain-eating amoeba that also lives in freshwater.
But even though the woman used tap water, the odds were in her favor that she would have been fine.
She used the device over the span of a year. However, instead of using sterile water, she used tap water that had been run through a store-bought filter.
"When I operated on this lady, a section of her brain about the size of a golf ball was bloody mush", Dr Charles Cobbs, a neurosurgeon at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, told The Seattle Times.
After she died, doctors determined the specific infection had been caused by an amoeba called Balamuthia mandrillaris. After experiencing an intense seizure and an apparent loss of brain cognition, doctors started to investigate the possibility of the problem being in her brain. According to the CDC, the amoeba was discovered in 1986 and officially declared a new species in 1993. Globally, only 200 infections have ever been recorded, of which 70 occurred in the United States.
The case report notes that GAE is rare and the CDC described it as a "very rare disease that is usually fatal".
According to Dr. Zara Patel, a professor of otolaryngology at Stanford University, when people use contaminated water to rinse their nose and sinuses, they can be at risk for aggressive infections. Not suspecting anything particularly unusual, her doctors diagnosed it as a rosacea, a common skin condition, with treatments lasting for about a year. In cases involving N. fowleri, for example, people have contracted the amoeba by jumping into a lake and having water shoot up their noses. But an examination of tissue taken from her brain during surgery a day later showed she was up against a much deadlier attack, one that had been underway for about a year and was literally eating her alive. The woman died about a month later. "Repeat CT imaging demonstrated further hemorrhage into the original resection cavity". There have been over 200 diagnoses of the disease worldwide, 70 of which were in the United States, per the CDC. "At this point, the family chose to withdraw support", the report continued. It's extremely important to use sterile saline or sterile water.
