Friday, September 28, 2007
Daily Dude I Want to Hit: Naegleria fowleri
Name: Naegleria fowleri
DOB: Discovered in 1960s
Occupation: algae consumption, laying the necrotic inflammatory smack down on one's central nervous system
Hometown: discovered in Australia
Current residence: anywhere it's hot...like Arizona
Why I Want to Hit that Hotness: A couple years ago, I went to a wedding in California (Dirty Hippie, a friend from my old job in Seattle). DirtyHippie and I were cubicle neighbors, and trust that I teased him mercilessly about his interests, fashion sense, and taste in music. He even shaved the dreadlocks he was attempting to rat into his hair because of my constant harping on how disgusting I thought it was. Anyway, because this dude is a semi-hippie, after the wedding, we all went camping at this hot spring about 20 miles outside Santa Barbara. I don't mind camping for one or two days, so long as it's car camping without much hiking, with ample beer, food, and coolers, and with access to a shower or some type of water source during the time. Even if I just give myself a whore's bath (heating up water in a pan, stripping down to your skivvies, and sponging yourself off with the water and whatever detergent is handy), I have to be able to carry out the most basic hygiene chores. I ask myself, "What would Lil' Kim do?", and I know that even if she was roughing it in the backcountry of southern California, she'd be keeping her pussy (and all her other plastic body parts) fresh.
Being aware that this was an extremely primitive campsite, I purchased an extra 5-gallon dispenser of purified water at the grocery store strictly for bathing. The morning after a drunken night of stumbling around in the darkness to find the hot spring, wading through streams, pissing in the woods, sleeping uncomfortably on hard ground, listening to the godawful Phish that my damn hippie friends liked, and consuming around four cases of Tecate, I brought my washing water to the hot spring, threw it in, and heated it up. While I was waiting for the water to heat, DirtyHippie and I were sitting around in the hot spring, and got to talking microbial pathogens. He's in medical school.
"Dude, have you ever heard of Naegleria fowleri?" he asked me.
"No," I said, somewhat perturbed. It's rare that someone drops the name of an infectious microbe that I don't know. "Is that a bacterium?" I'd never even heard of anything in genus Naegleria.
"It's a protozoan," he said. "It kills you by melting your brain!"
"Really?" I said. I was wondering if he was fucking with me, because surely I'd have heard of something causing such extreme pathology. "Are you kidding me? What do you mean by this 'brain-melting'? Give it to me in science."
"Amoebic meningoencephalitis. It's pretty rare. Something like only 6 cases have occurred in the last 10 years, and usually it's associated with some type of facial injury, like a broken nose or soft palate injury."
"Interesting," I said. "But you know me, I steer clear of those parasitic diseases. Viruses are my jam."
"Well, I bring it up because they're commonly associated with hot springs and other warm, standing freshwater bodies. So you might want to think twice before ducking your head under water."
"Like I'm bathing in this hot spring, hippie! I'm not ducking my head under anything unless it's a hot guy or this double distilled shower water I brought from the grocery store!"
I pretty much forgot about N. fowleri except that it had a very impressive mortality rate and was a reminder of why I don't like swimming in lakes, until TODAY.
As I was scanning the news this morning, I came across a local news story from Arizona, which led off with this graphic:
Labels: Daily Dude I Want to Hit, destroy all children, epidemic geekery, science
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