Naegleria Fowleri: Brain-Eating Amoeba Claims Third Victim This Summer

Naegleria Fowleri shown in tissue. The deadly, brain-eating amoeba has taken its third victim this summer, after it killed a man in his early 20s.

Naegleria Fowleri has taken its third victim this summer, after the brain-eating amoeba killed a man in his early 20s, a health official said.

The unidentified Louisiana man died in June after he caught the parasite while rinsing his sinuses with tap water using a neti pot, reports AP.

The lethal amoeba usually enters its victim though the nose and burrows into the skull, devouring brain tissue.

Health investigators found the amoeba in home's water system but said the microscopic critter was confined to the house and not in city water sample.

Reports of the man's death come just days after a 9-year-old Virginia boy and a 16-year-old Florida girl succumbed to the same disease, AP reports.

In both cases, the children caught meningoencephalitis - the brain infection caused by the amoeba - after swimming in pools of stagnant freshwater, where the parasite proliferates.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the infection is not communicable and spreads rapidly, killing its victim within days.

"It's very difficult to treat. Most people die from it," Dr. Raoult Ratard, Louisiana's state epidemiologist, told AP.

Only about 120 cases have been reported since the amoeba was identified in the early 1960s, the CDC said.

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