After bathing the brain parasite penetrated

16-year-old Courtney Nash of Florida resident and could not imagine that bathing in the river on a hot day could end for it a long and painful death. The girl was the victim of a dangerous parasite that attacks the brain.

August 3 Courtney went with his cousins ​​on the river St. John. Bathing passed as usual, and no particular incidents girls do not remembered. But a week later Courtney began strange headaches, numbness of extremities, fever and dizziness - symptoms classics amoebic meningoencephalitis . This is a dangerous parasitic infection that attacks the brain and spinal cord.

The parasite enters the human body through the nose, passes through the sinuses, it reaches the brain and cerebrospinal fluid. Human infection are extremely rare, but the parasite is most often found in standing and flowing bodies of water during the hot summer days.

The girl was initially taken to a local hospital, then to Children's Hospital in Orlando Arnold Palmer. The doctors have taken all possible steps have experienced different treatment algorithms, tried to use every chance, but nothing helped. Courtney condition steadily worsened, it became critical, and she died last Saturday in the intensive care unit.

Even before the death of a young patient's doctor determined she had the presence of the organism amoeba Naegleria fowleri. In Brevard County, where I came from Courtney, it was the third documented case of infection amoebic meningoencephalitis   1985. Throughout America each year is fixed not more than 2-3 such cases.

Unfortunately, the disease is still virtually incurable. Since the 1970s, all-aware of only one person who was able to recover after infection, all other cases ended in death.

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