One of the diseases that lands high on my “oh, crap” list is Naegleria fowleri, or the amoeba that enters its human victims by the nose, often while they’re swimming in a lake, and destroy their brain – and is virtually incurable, with only a couple of known survivors. So while reading an article in NewScientist (1 October 2016) on some progress on discovering why it prefers brains (over, say, toe-nail clippings), I was dismayed at the final thoughts on the subject:
This could become a more urgent problem in the coming years – infections are predicted to rise as the climate warms.
And yet another reason to take climate change seriously – I mean, who wants a world where half the epitaphs are “I died because my brain was eaten by amoebas”?
