New drugs may help patients with life-threatening 'brain-eating' amoeba infections
thrives in warm freshwater and infects swimmers accidentally when contaminated water gets forced up the nose and ultimately into the brain.On a hot Saturday in San Antonio over 10 years ago, an 8-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital after days of fever, headache, vomiting and sensitivity to light. The child's mother, who lived near the Texas-Mexico border, had taken him to a series of clinics in Mexico, but his condition had worsened.
Elsewhere in the world, the numbers are similar. It's rare to become ill from an infection with this amoeba — and it's very, very rare to survive. But the few recent survivors may owe their recovery to miltefosine, the most recently recommended new medication for primary amebic meningoencephalitis , the disease caused by the amoeba. New drugs may be on the horizon as well. The question is whether they can reach patients before the damage is done.
The doctors ordered the drug from the CDC. It arrived 14 hours after the child was admitted.But he was not unscarred. When the boy left the hospital, he could breathe on his own but not do much else. After months of rehabilitation, he regained some of his abilities, but his family still had to help him with basic self-care, Conrad said.
However, not all PAM patients who have received miltefosine have survived. Even with the new drug, PAM has a fatality rate of over 97%, So Lorenzo-Morales and his team are looking for alternatives. One of the most promising is nitroxoline, an antibiotic used in Europe to treat urinary tract infections. Lorenzo-Morales and his team reported in the journal, without causing toxic effects on host cells. This drug has also been used to successfully treat one patient infected with
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