You know it stops being rare when it keeps happening. It soon will be impossible to swim in lakes and rivers, along with ponds soon. This is climate change. The warm weather, and wamer water is allowing these things to thrive.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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I mean they've always been active in the South. Any warm unchlorinated water means they'll be there eating bacteria. They just very rarely accidentally find themselves in your brain and start eating that. They're so common that the amount of people who have antibodies against them from finding their way into some random orifice is very high.
It is one of my biggest semi-irrational fears but I had never considered that you could have antibodies for them.
Very common since fowleri itself is very common and is generally not geared to actually fight your immune system in any way(since it's an organism where any entry into a body is essentially an evolutionary dead end). In the South that is. Anywhere water doesn't freeze over the winter because it can't survive that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014489418300705 - 98 percent seropositive here. Hopefully that resolves some of your fears because as you can see, people interact with it a lot without ill effects. Frankly simple drowning should be a much bigger concern.
What's more scary is how many people in endemic areas in third world countries are seropositive for rabies
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11798433/ 11 percent here in Brazilian indigenous communities for those who have not been vaccinated. That's a lot of close calls
I had no idea you could even be seropositive for rabies without having it!
Yeah once it shows clinical symptoms it's always fatal, but there are subclinical infections. We just don't know how many and in what proportion.
Would that mean we could vaccinate for them?
Opposite actually. PAM is because they end up locked behind the blood brain barrier where the really effective immune cells can't get to them. A vaccination is pointless because they are already easily destroyed by immune cells otherwise. It's like accidentally wandering into a bank vault full of Cheetos while they were delivering more Cheetos and getting yourself locked in for fowleri. A poor situation for them and a poor situation for the Cheeto Bank.
A child in South Carlonina
Ah yes, the famous Carlonina
Poor kid.
RFK Jr's pestilence is spreading.