Louisiana girl, 8, dies from rare brain-eating amoeba contracted in lake

On the day after her eighth birthday, a Louisiana girl named Lillian Smart died from one of nature's most unforgiving infections — a microscopic amoeba that entered her brain through lake water and left medicine with almost nothing to offer. Naegleria fowleri, present in warm freshwater across the country, kills in nearly every case it reaches, and it reached Lillian during a summer swim at Lake Claiborne. Her death is the fourth such loss Louisiana has recorded in fifteen years, and it arrives as a quiet reminder that some dangers wear no visible face — only the ordinary shimmer of water on a