ORLANDO, Fla. —A South Florida boy has survived a rare brain-eating amoeba that kills most people, aided in part because a hard-to-get drug to fight the infection is made by a company based in Orlando where he was hospitalized, doctors said.
Sebastian DeLeon came to the hospital two weeks ago with sensitivity to light and a headache so severe the 16-year-old couldn’t tolerate anyone touching him, doctors at Florida Hospital for Children said at a news conference.
Hospital staffers had been trained to look for the amoeba, which often is contracted through the nose when swimming in freshwater lakes or rivers. The infection has a fatality rate of 97 percent and another boy died from it at the same hospital two years ago.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says only four out of 138 people have survived being infected with the amoeba in the past 50 years, including DeLeon, according to the hospital’s doctors.
“It is so rare that a lot of times we don’t think of it and that’s where a delay occurs in starting a treatment,” said Dr. Dennis Hernandez, head of the hospital’s emergency department. “It wasn’t very clear-cut and I’m still shaking about the whole case.”
DeLeon, who had worked as a camp counselor in Broward County, was infected in South Florida. He began having a severe headache two weeks ago on the same day his family traveled to Orlando for a vacation. His parents took him to the emergency room at Florida Hospital almost a day and a half later when his headache worsened.
Acting on a hunch, emergency room doctors ordered a spinal tap to test for meningitis, and lab scientist Sheila Black found the amoeba moving in the spinal fluid. Doctors lowered the teen’s body temperature to 33 degrees, induced a coma, inserted a breathing tube and gave him a cocktail of drugs that help kill the amoeba.
One of the drugs, miltefosine, isn’t readily available at most hospitals.
