A Rubber Hose Up Your Nose

[Writers Plot]

posted by Doranna Durgin

Actually, in this case, a rubber hose might be more preferable. And I'm not talking about the recent photo of the record-breaking guy who threads a snake up his nose and down out his mouth. Oddly...even that would be more preferable.
I'm talking about the brain-eating amoeba.

Recently, a teen went swimming in Lake Havasu--not far from here, as distance is measured in Arizona. A week after that, he was dead, the sixth person to die this year due to the invasion of the amoeba Naegleria fowleri. In his brain.

Yes, this amoeba swims right up your nose and commences to chow its way into your brain, hand-walking its way up your olfactory nerve like a little superhero (well, sans the actual hands, and probably without the cape). Once it starts on its path, you're pretty much...dead. Even the CDC, after advising you to get immediate help if you show symptoms after swimming, says well, there are treatments...but we don't know if they work against the amoeba because everyone dies anyway.

The thing is, up until this year--when six people have died from Naegleria invasion this year (and I think it's only appropriate that it sounds like an alien attack, because this whole thing is right up there with the Twilight Zone)--deaths from this parasite have been much lower, with 23 people dead between '95 and '04. So why the sudden increase?

It's not hard to sort out, once you realize that the precious little creatures love warm water. Typically, they live in lake bottoms, in the shallows. So if you, say, have a global shift of weather patterns, say, and the temperatures rise, just for instance, and there happens to be widespread drought at the same time...

Suddenly there you are, more warm shallow water than you know what to do with. Naegleria won't be the only species responding to the change...from the bottom of the food chain to the top, the ripple effect is in play. Species struggling, species moving their ranges if they're fast enough, species thriving and some just plain dying out. Just this past winter I was treated to the shocking sight of a roadrunner hoofing it down my driveway.

No big deal, you might think--you live in Arizona, and so do roadrunners. Well, no they don't--not at seven thousand feet, where we have true winter and regular nightly temps below zero F, not to mention the snow. Makes it kind of hard on a bird who eats beetles and lizards--I was hoping he might make do on the barn mice. I spotted him regularly through February, by which time he was looking pretty ragged...and then he was gone. In the interim I called various bird rescue folks and the forest service, and was told this sort of thing is happening more often now. Gee. I wonder why?

Fortunately, the prevention for Naegleria is pretty straightforward, not to mention inexpensive...either you don't put your head under the water or you use nose clips. Cannonballs and rowdy activity in warm shallow lake water without nose clips...not advised.

Fixing the conditions that lead to its sudden rise in activity is another thing again.

But oh, wait! The current administration assures us there's no global warming, right? No worries! Whew! That was close. So now we can all go swimming without nose clips, right?

...Right?