FL Teen Recovering From Brain-Eating Amoeba Returns Home

FORT MYERS, FL — A Florida boy recovering from a brain-eating amoeba in Illinois returned home Thursday, according to a GoFundMe fundraiser for his family.

Caleb Ziegelbauer, 13, nearly died last summer after he was hospitalized because of the amoeba Naegleria fowleri following a July 1 family trip to Port Charlotte.

"The Ziegelbauers are looking forward to finally being together again for real," Katie Chiet, who organized the fundraiser, wrote on GoFundMe. "We want to thank you again for all of your love and support for the last (eight) months. Your donations have helped cover all the things insurance won't — medical supplies and upcoming neuro intensive therapies! We're all about the next best thing and we're figuring that out now that he's all but exhausted his therapy benefits."

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The teen started complaining about a headache about five days after swimming in the brackish water at Port Charlotte. A day later he had a fever and by July 9, he was disoriented.

Caleb spent nearly two months at Golisano Children’s Hospital of Southwest Florida in Fort Myers, where he was diagnosed with meningitis and placed in the pediatric intensive care unit. Doctors said the amoeba was the cause of his illness.

At the end of August, he was transferred to Chicago’s Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Wednesday afternoon, flying out of Tampa via Jet ICU, which provided the flight and transport at no cost to his family.

The single-celled organism Naegleria fowleri lives in soil and warm fresh water like lakes, rivers and hot springs, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. It’s often referred to as a “brain-eating amoeba” because it can cause a brain infection when water containing the amoeba goes up the nose. The symptoms are similar to bacterial meningitis.

Only three people each year are infected with Naegleria fowleri and most people die from it, the agency said. The death rate for those infected by the amoeba is more than 97 percent.

From 1962 to 2021, only four people in the United States have survived an infection caused by the amoeba, the CDC said.

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