I’m thinking that an eye-dropper full of amoeba-infused water would be a great assassination weapon for a sleeping victim.
Luckily, we have no Krogers around here!
That’s a pretty low rate of infection- but it’s a lot of affected people.
I don’t know how many people have been killed by hantavirus or West Nile or Lyme Disease, but all those are legit concerns.
2 days since swimming
no symptoms so far
Everything I’ve read says that boiling or proper filtration (below 0.2 microns) is enough. Do you have other information?
Though I must admit boiling the water takes out the convenience of the whole thing. The whole thing is rather temperature sensitive, so water faucets make the whole thing a lot easier. And the filters seem to be so expensive. Still, being sick sucks.
Well you wouldn’t expect symptoms during the incubation period, would you? :dubious:
There is a little girl recovering from that in Little Rock, so it is a popular subject on the news. It is said by those who know to occur in shallow water where folks are kicking up the gunk on the bottom, that is swims up your nose and that it may require an unusual formation of a structure that allows contact from the back of the nose to the brain.
I bet your safe, and that a whole bunch of folks are worried about it in this area, so I bet the Doctors are studied up on it.
Exactly this. Could be 7-14 days before there’s anything to notice, then maybe a slight fever.
I bet you are safe. 
Here is a link to the local story.
Its comical because our terrible diet, sedentary lifestyle, social isolation and high stress lives is what is ruining our health by and large, these diseases like mad cow or infections from water are real, but not really something most people will ever experience.
The physician in the link I provided said that the benefits from swimming are far greater than the possibility of getting an amoeba in your brain.
The reality is that we don’t have enough information to say. The amoeba are very rare and waters are very rarely tested for them. Generally, testing only happens after an infection has occurred. In those cases, the exposure is usually in shallow water ('cause that’s where people frolic), so those are the areas tested. That means that most positive results are in shallow water, but the vast majority of testing is also in shallow water.
If the very low risk of this infection has you worried, use nose clips when you swim. Problem solved.
[QUOTE=BigT]
Everything I’ve read says that boiling or proper filtration (below 0.2 microns) is enough. Do you have other information?
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Nope, you are correct. Boiling the water before use is effective. I’m just too lazy to do it.
Aren’t repetitive actions and obsessive thoughts early indicators of infection:dubious:
Wow.
The device that makes reverse osmosis water for my aquariums has a .5 micron filter.
It removes chlorine and metals. Perhaps you or I are off by a decimal point. The hydra I occasionally find in an aquarium, when balled up to escape being crushed are about a millimeter in diameter.
You’re off. There’s no way a 0.5 micron filter alone removes chlorine. There might be some other method associated with it that removes chlorine (for example, carbon filter). Viruses will go through 0.3 micron pores. Chlorine and metals are much smaller.
I live alone in a huge, 15 yr old 3 story house. I finished the lowest floor (tri level) and moved down there a year ago, rarely go to upper floors, except when I have company. So I noticed in the upper floor jacuzzi, and the upper floor tubs, when hot water is turned on, there are tiny black flakes for the first 5 minutes. If you rub them with a wash cloth on the white tub walls, they smear. The only way to clean them is with barkeepers friend or scouring powder.
It’s never in the cold water lines.
Anything to be worried about?
Hard to tell from this description alone, but I’d suspect mold in the pipes. Probably nothing to worry about, but I can’t guarantee that without testing. The easiest way to prevent it is to flush the pipes regularly.
Yep, how humans process risk is very interesting.
I should say though that when I said mad cow disease “only kills one in a million”, I wasn’t being serious. I don’t think it is acceptable to have to play the Fatal Neurodegeneration Lottery every time you have a burger
Certainly hot pools are a major risk factor - I grew up in NZ in an area with lots of geothermal pools. We were very aware of the risks of amoebic meningitis (caused by Naegleria fowler) - 8 deaths between 1968 and 1978, according to wiki (and I bet my mother could have told you about of most of those reported during that period, every time we headed off to the hot pools).
Basically, the rules were that if the pool was unlined (dirt/mud bottoms), there was no diving/jumping/ducking etc. You avoided any actions that might force water up your nose. Of course, we were kids, and the rules were more like … guidelines. Fortunately our nearest pools at Awakeri were concreted and treated, and we could be as active as we liked - or at least until the heat sapped our energy and all we could do was soak in the sulphurous mineral waters. Good times.
We never considered lakes/rivers to be a risk for amoebic meningitis - they had giardia and a variety of other intestinal disorders due to the high bovine faecal load from intensive dairy farming (as well as the generic risk of drowning in deep or fast flowing waters). But we swam and played in the lakes and rivers and streams and hot pools, and most of us survived.
Here in the UK, I have swum in a number of lakes - some manmade shallow things used for water skiing/rowing, with swans and ducks and little inflow/outflow. Some of those have been pretty warm, too, up to 24° (too hot for wetsuits). But I never would have considered amoebic meningitis a risk. Swimmers itch, I got several times, and a few doses of runny guts. But nothing serious.
Looks like 1 micron and carbon.
1 X 10 -6 meter.