Success sometimes comes one step at a time. This is an interesting article about a recent survivor in Florida. Four people out of 138 have survived in 50 years.
The key to survival is early diagnosis and knowing the treatment. Although I would guess the 33 degrees body temp in the article was probably celsius, about 91 fahrenheit. I could be wrong.
Aiding the early diagnosis is awareness of the symptoms. From what I have read, it starts with a severe headache and nausea/vomiting. Then altered mental status. The mental status can be best described as postictal without the seizure. For those involved with EMS or Nursing, or have family that is epileptic, you know what I am talking about.
Much of what I have read indicates that the amoeba is abundant during the summer months but very rarely is able to migrate to a part of the brain to cause damage. Isolating the body of water would not have much impact since every surrounding body of water probably has the same amoeba. Education about how the amoeba gets in and ways of preventing it would be more productive.
James
I guess not having much water on the ground can be a good thing, and what we do have is pretty nasty looking, keeps people from wanting to swim. I don't know much about that amoeba, just what I seen on the news, but it is certainly one of those things I never want to meet.
My experience with naturally nasty, mucky water around here is so long as you don't go head first while taking a deep breath in, you'll be alright. I have had nasty water splash up into my mouth a many a times and never had any troubles from it, even have had water setting in a manhole pan splash directly into my mouth (PS look away when taking one off). I can see how someone falling out of a white water raft would get a head and mouth full of the stuff, like the young lady from Ohio at the Whitewater Center in Charlotte.
I can hear my mom to this day telling me "don't kick up the mud or get water up your nose or you will get an amoeba". Seems like the news stations used to warn of elevated levels of amoebas when it was warm out and hadn't rained in a while I think.
We get them down here, you here about them in Lake Pontchartrain. From what I understand you'd have to inhale water through your nose.
Standing water is not an issue here. In the rare event that some is sighted it has usually evaporated by the time we get across the street to it... Humidity here is often below %15.
I didn't start following this until about 6 weeks ago. There was a young man from Houston working at a local church camp that got sick. Turns out he had that amoeba. It's a lake that we would ski in every Sunday from March to September in my younger days. I still have a lake lot about 1/2 mile from the camp.
James
We have hundreds of lakes in FL that contain the amoeba you mentioned. The tempature and the Trophic status of the lake is a good indicator of the presence, or not, of the amoeba. Usually lakes which are spring fed from the aquifer don't support the amoeba because the water tempature is too cold (72 degrees) for them to survive. They mostly occur in drainage and/or seepage lakes as opposed to the spring fed ones.
