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Neti Pot and Brain-Eating Amoeba in Tap Water Thought to Have Caused Seattle Woman's Death

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 08 2018, @09:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the ewwwwwh dept.

takyon writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @01:39AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @01:39AM (#771736)

    FTA:

    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.

    This bit really should have been added to the summary since neti pots aren't exactly so common that most people know what they are. They are hypothesizing that the woman's use of non-sterile tap water to do nasal lavage with her neti pot was what caused the fatal infection. She had a sore on her nose that was later seen to have been due to the amoeba, so it's not exactly implausible.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday December 09 2018, @02:23AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday December 09 2018, @02:23AM (#771754) Journal

    That bit has been in TFS all along...

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 09 2018, @03:18AM (1 child)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday December 09 2018, @03:18AM (#771773) Journal

      Yeah, people seem incapable of reading beyond headlines now. That 140-character limit for so long in some social media seems to have rotted people's brains irrevocably.

      Next up -- comments from people who can't even be bothered to read to the end of the headline: "Huh, so this Neti pot an and ameoba got together and thought about something? That's pretty cool -- what were they thinking about again?"

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @05:45AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @05:45AM (#771822)

        tldr