...Naegleria Fowleri

Naegleria Fowleri or the Brain-Eating Amoeba has claimed 3 lives so far. Christian Strickland, a 9-year-old from Henrico County in Virginia contracted an infection after visiting a fishing camp in his state. He died of meningitis on August 5. Earlier this month, Courtney Nash succumbed to the brain-eating amoeba after diving off a dock into the St. John's River at her grandmother's house in Florida. Usually found in warm, stagnant water in freshwater lakes, ponds, and rivers, the parasite "enters the nasal passages ... and migrates to the olfactory nerves, eventually invading the brain," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It almost always causes meningitis. Symptoms include fever, nausea, stiff neck and a frontal headache. Between 2001 and 2010 32 of these cases were reported and almost all of them ended in death. Though most consider this tragic I see ti as a warning. Who still goes swimming in lakes and ponds? I know swimming pools are not the leanest things in the world but if you MUST go swimming, swim there. There are so many known and unknown things lurking in ponds and rivers and lakes and once you are in there there is very little you can do to protect yourself. So what this is America, things travel and foreign objects enter U.S. water, air, land, etc. daily. I am giving this a Digit Down but I hoe that this is a clear warning to those out there that tend to hang out in that type of swimming water