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Fatal brain-eating amoeba may have come from woman's neti pot
A Seattle woman rinsed her sinuses with tap water. A year later, she died of a brain-eating amoeba. Her case is reported this week in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2018.09.013] [DX].
The 69-year-old, whose name was not given, had a lingering sinus infection. For a month, she tried to get rid of it using a neti pot with tap water instead of using sterile water, as is recommended. Neti pots are used to pour saline into one nostril and out of the other to irrigate the sinuses, usually to fight allergies or infections.
According to the doctors who treated the woman, the non-sterile water that she used it thought to have contained Balamuthia mandrillaris, an amoeba that over the course of weeks to months can cause a very rare and almost always fatal infection in the brain.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 09 2018, @12:34AM (2 children)
I think a lot depends on which tap the water comes from.
Most municipal water in the western world is so full of chlorine, ammonia and other sterilizing agents that I'm more concerned about putting those in my body than any biological threat. The biggest biological threat in drinking water is usually e coli, cross contamination by wastewater - and of course the other non e coli things that can come with that.
Our house water is "raw" as delivered from a 200 ft deep aquifer. Typically in Florida the aquifer water is filtered through a deep layer of limestone between the surface and where it is pumped from, although in some places they are proposing injecting river (read: surface runoff) water into the aquifer before it mixes with sea water. The main contaminant we deal with is hydrogen sulfide, but due to our lack of sterilizers we also get a lot of red-brown algae growth, the occasional shot of chlorine bleach tends to keep the pipes fairly clean - but, yeah, I doubt I'd rinse my sinuses with our tap water, just to be safe.
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(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday December 10 2018, @07:47PM (1 child)
Not just tap water. In the past, others have died from the amoeba growing in the hot water tank. Baffled the testers initially because the cold water didn't show any signs of the amoeba.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @08:39PM
A slow enough moving hot water tank will burn off all the poisonous gasses... I have friends from Borneo who wouldn't think of brushing their teeth with water from the hot tap, much less drinking it - they boil their tea water from the cold - hot tap is basically for showering only.
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