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: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 09 2018, @12:40AM
The sinuses are a very scary place. Scarier still, some surgeons use an approach through the sinuses to do some brain surgeries - and apparently they have a high rate of success with less side affects than other approaches and a very low complication from infection rate.
On the other hand, it has also been shown that tongue piercings can lead to serious brain infections... all depends on the situation.
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