N.C. Teen Critically Ill With Rare Brain-Eating Amoeba

In the waning days of summer, a teenager in central North Carolina lies critically ill with one of medicine's most humbling adversaries — Naegleria fowleri, a brain-eating amoeba that has claimed all but four of the 164 Americans it has infected since 1962. The organism asks nothing dramatic of its host: only a dive, a splash, a moment of water forced through the nose and into the brain. State health officials have named the case not to provoke fear, but to remind a swimming public that rare dangers are not imaginary ones, and that knowledge — of how the amoeba travels, where it gathers, and h