Woman tragically dies after catching brain-eating amoeba from indoor pool
Topics: Health, Animals, World News
Yasmeen Hamadeh
Featured Image Credit: New Taipei City Department of Health/Shutterstock
Topics: Health, Animals, World News
A 30-year-old woman has died after catching a brain-eating amoeba from an indoor swimming pool.
The case was reported in northern Taiwan in the summer of 2023 at the New Taipei City indoor water park, where it's believed the young woman contracted Naegleria fowleri, a microbial organism that is fatal in 97 percent of cases.
She's believed to have been learning how to surf in a wave pool where water got up her nose, allowing the organism to seep through.
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This is the most common way people are infected with the amoeba.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Tseng Shu-huai shared in a news briefing in Taiwan that traces of N. fowleri were found in the woman and that she died from meningitis.
She suffered from seizures, headaches, a fever, and a stiffness in her neck and shoulders six days before she passed.
The water park was subsequently tested for the amoeba with results finding that there was too little chlorine in the water to kill the organism.
They also found traces of the amoeba in a puddle in the park's basement, with health officials saying it could have spread from there to the pools through the staffs' shoe wear.
N. fowleri thrives in warm freshwater environments and can infect swimmers by entering through the nose and traveling up to the brain where it destroys tissue and ultimately causes a swelling that leads to death.
According to the CDC, the infection has an incredibly high fatality rate of over 97 percent, with only four people ever surviving it out of 154 known infections in the United States from 1962 to 2021.
This marked Taiwan's first death from N. fowleri in 12 years, per Taipei Times.