Amoebas From Neti Pot Devour Seattle Woman's Brain

SEATTLE, WA - A Seattle woman died this year after ingesting brain-eating amoebas through a neti pot. The 69-year-old was treated by doctors at Swedish Medical Center, who later published a study of the woman's illness in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

According to the doctors' study, the woman was treating chronic sinus infections with a neti pot, a device that flushes the nose with water. The woman was using tap water in her neti pot, which allowed the amoebas, called Balamuthia mandrillaris, to enter her brain. Neti pots are only supposed to be used with either sterile or salt water.

Swedish neurosurgeon Dr. Charles S. Cobbs described to the Seattle Times what the amoebas did to the woman's brain.

“When I operated on this lady, a section of her brain about the size of a golf ball was bloody mush,” Cobbs told the paper.

There have been just over 100 Balamuthia mandrillaris amoeba infections in the U.S. since 1974, according to the Seattle Times. Another brain-eating amoeba found in the U.S., Naegleria fowleri, is slightly less rare. There were 34 cases between 2008 and 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Three of those case were traced back to neti pots.

The Seattle woman's symptoms began with a nasty infection in her nose. She was using tap water treated with a Brita filter for about a month when she developed a "quarter-sized rash" on the bridge of her nose.

A year later, the woman suffered a seizure. The woman underwent a CT scan, and doctors discovered a lesion on the right side of her brain, according to the Swedish doctors' research paper. Doctors took a biopsy from her brain and sent it to a lab at Johns Hopkins University.

Nineteen days later, Johns Hopkins doctors suggested the woman had an amoebic infection. Swedish doctors gave an anti-amoebic drug called miltefosine — but the woman died about a week later.

"The case reported here shows an extremely unusual disease, with an almost uniformly fatal outcome. Nevertheless, it is important for the clinician to be aware of this disease since rapid diagnosis and subsequent therapy has, in some cases, been associated with survival," the doctors wrote in their report.

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