SEATTLE — A 69-year-old Seattle woman is no longer around after developing rare brain-eating amoebas.
According to the Seattle Times, the woman was admitted into the Swedish Medical Center emergency room in January after suffering a seizure.
After conducting a CT scan of her brain, doctors discovered something in her brain, which they initially thought was a tumor.
During her brain surgery the next day, a tissue sample revealed her brain had been under attack from brain-eating amoebas for about a year.
According to Dr. Charles Cobbs, a neurosurgeon at Swedish, during a phone interview with the Seattle Times, "there were these amoebas all over the place just eating brain cells. We didn't have any clue what was going on, but when we got the actual tissue we could see it was the amoeba."
The woman unfortunately passed away a month later. Doctors think the rare organisms enter her brain after the woman had used a neti pot to clean out her sinuses.
This is because the woman used regular tap water in her neti pot, instead of using distilled, sterile or boiled water as health experts suggest.
According to ABC 11, tap water can contain tiny organisms that are safe to drink but can survive in your nasal passages.
These type of infections are extremely rare, with only three cases occurring in the U.S. from 2008 to 2017.
