The death of a US teenager from a rare brain-eating amoeba that investigators think he was exposed to in warm waters at Lake Mead should prompt caution, not panic, among people at freshwater lakes, rivers and springs, experts said.
"It gets people's attention because of the name," former public health epidemiologist Brian Labus said of the naturally occurring organism, which is officially called Naegleria fowleri but almost always dubbed the brain-eating amoeba. "But it is a very, very rare disease."
The federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has tallied just 154 cases of infection and death from the amoeba in the US since 1962, said Mr Labus, who teaches at the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Almost half those cases were in Texas and Florida. Only one was reported in Nevada before this week.
