Woman deceased after supposedly harmless nasal douche

Nasal shower with tap water: woman dies from brain-eating amoebas

Actually, nasal douches are helpful if you want to treat a sinusitis. But they are misused to health risk. As with an older American, who probably suffered from this treatment brain-eating amoebae, which led to the death of the woman.

Improper use of a nasal douche

In the US, one woman died a year after the wrong use of a nasal shower. According to media reports, the 69-year-old from Seattle (Washington) used only tap water instead of recommended sterile water or a saline solution. As a result, apparently brain-eating amoebae penetrated her body, which eventually led to the death of the woman. The case, which is already a bit dated, is currently being reported in the journal "Journal of Infectious Diseases".

Nasal douches are well suited for the treatment of sinusitis. However, if used improperly, you can catch deadly pathogens, as a case from the US shows. (Image: Stefan Balk / fotolia.com)

Deaths by amoebae

Over the past few years, reports have frequently been reported of cases in which people were killed by amoebas, especially from the USA.

For example, a woman in California died after swimming in the swimming pool because she had caught the parasite Naegleria fowleri.

This amoeba species was also responsible for the death of an 18-year-old girl from North Carolina. The teenage girl had become infected while swimming in the lake.

According to a report by the Seattle Times, the case from the US state of Washington is the first to be associated with improper nasal rinsing.

It started with a wound on the nose

The amoebae found in the Seattle woman were Balamuthia mandrillaris, which can cause a very rare and almost always lethal brain infection over weeks to months, CNN reports..

For the 69-year-old, the infection began with the formation of a raised, red wound on the bridge of her nose.

The doctors took it for a rash and prescribed an antibiotic ointment, which, however, brought no relief. Over the course of a year, dermatologists have been looking for a cause.

Then the left side of the woman's body began to shake. She had a seizure that had weakened her left arm.

She was then taken to the ER at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, where a CT scan revealed an abnormal lesion in her brain that indicated a tumor, so doctors sent a tissue sample for testing.

Over the next few days, more scans showed that everything in her brain was getting worse and worse. The mass grew and new lesions appeared.

Operation brought clarity

Finally, the doctors at the hospital opted for brain surgery. It showed that something was much more dangerous than a tumor was underway.

"When I operated on this woman, a section of her brain the size of a golf ball was bloody pulp," Dr. Charles Cobbs, neurosurgeon at the Swedish Medical Center, in a telephone interview with the Seattle Times.

"There were these amoebas everywhere that were eating brain cells. We had no idea what was going on, but when we had the actual tissue we could see it was the amoeba. "

The patient died one month later from the rare organisms that had invaded her brain.

Water supply was not tested

The physicians assume that the amoebas could get into her body through the nasal shower, which the woman used last year because of sinusitis.

According to the 69-year-old used tap water and not as recommended sterile water or saline solution.

However, the doctors also said that they could not definitely associate the infection with the nasal rinse because the water supply to their home was not tested for the amoeba.

According to Dr. Cobbs can not infect humans simply by swallowing contaminated water with amoebae. According to experts, this is very possible over the nose.

Dangerous organisms could spread further north

The woman's infection is the second in Seattle, the first was reported in 2013.

According to a study published in November in the journal "Clinical Infectious Diseases", the researchers first became aware that this type of amoeba can cause disease in humans.

In this report, it was found that a total of 109 cases of amoebae were reported in the US between 1974 and 2016. Ninety percent of these cases were deadly.

Amoebae are single-celled organisms, some of which can cause disease. As they thrive in warm soils and water, there is growing concern that lethal infections due to global warming may spread further north.

The organisms are common in South America and Central America, but now also have better survival in other, usually cooler areas like Washington.

This concern is shared by Dr. Cynthia Maree, an infectious disease doctor from the Swedish Medical Center, who co-authored the case study on the patient.

"Given the mortality associated with this infection, I hoped I was wrong. But my fear was that I was right. "

Dr. Cobbs, however, "do not believe that there will be more cases in the future. At least that's what I hope. "(Ad)