Strange water related sickness

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What about the Flesh-eating bacteria .... a friend in adv ow class said her classmate scraped his knee on the bottom and contracted this Flesh-eating bacteria ... right here in LBTS area
KP
 
My dad just saw something in the news about an Amoeba which gets in through your nose/mouth and will eat your brain away. That is really scary because I just did my first fresh water dives in Central Florida (Devil's Den and Rainbow Springs). The majority of the reported cases of this have been reported around Orlando, Florida which is relatively close to those areas I dove. Does anyone know more about this? It's supposedly really rare but it is becoming increasingly common according to these reports.

How careful should we be when diving fresh water? Is this just lakes? How about springs? Rivers?

I did some research and this is what I've found so far...

Deadly amoeba lurks in Florida lakes - CNN.com

Naegleria fowleri - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Apparently the amoeba are found in 80F water and warmer.
 


A ScubaBoard Staff Message...

I merged the two threads on this topic, and due to the way the merge works, some of the sequence above this post may seem a little peculiar, logic-wise.
 
Growing up in Orlando, we were frequently reminded of amoeba problems when we swam in lakes. Apparently they thrive in the anaroebic mud in the lake bottoms. when the mud is stirred up, the amoeba are freed to swim in the water and get in the unsuspecting swimmer's ear canal, mouth or nose. It didn't happen all that often, but if it was a slow news day, you can bet it would be "breaking news...here's so and so with our continuing coverage of the brain eating killer amoeba"

As a kid and young teen, my friends and I would dive the water hazards at the local golf courses for balls to sell. We used those foamy ear plugs and kept our mouths tightly shut until we surfaced.
 
Yeah these things usually enter the brain by going in through the nose, then up into the brain through the cribriform plate. That's the area of bone at the superior portion of your nose that your olfactory nerve (one that gives you smell) comes down through, full of holes to let the nerve fibers run through.

Naegleria fowleri is the name of it, it's not "brain-eating" in the way people talk about "flesh-eating" (oh no they're coming to get us) bacteria. It gets into the tissues surrounding the brain, causes a bunch of inflammation and really the fluid + inflammation buildup causes your brain to swell and that causes herniation which leads to death, it's not that it goes in there and chomps you up. Swelling/herniation sounds horrible, but that's what ultimately causes death in a wide variety of brain injuries, not just this one.

More people have been exposed than are infected, studies have shown that there are a number of healthy people in endemic areas who have antibodies to Naegleria species, meaning they were exposed but didn't get sick.
 
Naegleria is a free-living amoeba which can enter the brain through the nasal passages. Once established, it is 100% fatal and usually kills within weeks.

The good news is that it is rare, requires very warm water, must be inhaled into the nose (and even then, infections are uncommon) and is easily killed by chlorination.

In the northern part of the country, Naegleria deaths are very,very rare and typically occur in over heated and under-chlorinated pools (the two often go hand in hand, in that over heating tends to drive off the chlorine).

This year has seen more deaths than average in the south, but the disease is still extremely unusual. Like hanta virus and plague in the Southwest, sporadic cases of amoebic encephalitis occur from time to time, but brain amoebiasis is not a major public health concern. Like rabies and plague, it is a dramatic and lethal illness that garners more media attention than the general risk it poses deserves.

The key is to be sure to keep hot tubs and heated pools properly chlorinated (it is wise never to immerse your head in a hot tub at all). The risk from very warm freshwater bodies of water is harder to assess and impossible to eliminate, but that risk is still quite low.

A good friend of mind, recently diseased, was one of the world's leading experts on this infection.

Not 100% fatal, there are case reports of survivors. Only 97% or so :)
 
What about the Flesh-eating bacteria .... a friend in adv ow class said her classmate scraped his knee on the bottom and contracted this Flesh-eating bacteria ... right here in LBTS area
KP

They didn't get necrotizing fasciitis from the water, they got it from themselves most likely. The bacteria that causes this is the same one that causes strep throat. A whole bunch of us have it sitting in our respiratory tract right now, and it's just hanging out.

Unless he has diabetes or something, then he probably just had a mixed infection with a wide variety of bacteria.

Luckily, everyone goes in and demands antibiotics for a simple viral cold (and then doesn't even finish the course of antibiotics after they feel better haha), so all these bacteria are getting super resistant. And we're not developing enough new antibiotics to keep up. Oh well!

Anyway, not something to worry about. Neither is N. fowleri. You should be scared of drowning, you're not too likely to get these.
 
my question really is are there really more cases of Naegleria fowleri popping up, or is it that we still have the same amount of cases but we're actually properly identifying them now?

if global warming really is a problem, and at the rate we're going in the amount of increase in cases, should we be worried in the near future? distant future? what can we do, will our children have fresh water to swim in? to dive? to drink?

how about spring water? bottled water? should we stop drinking bottled water just in case?
 
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https://xf2.scubaboard.com/community/forums/cave-diving.45/

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