North Carolina teen dies from rare brain-eating amoeba infection

In the warm freshwater lakes of central North Carolina, an invisible organism has claimed the life of a teenager — the second such death in the region within weeks. Naegleria fowleri, a microscopic amoeba that travels from water to brain with devastating efficiency, reminds us that nature's most consequential dangers are often its smallest. With mortality rates exceeding 95 percent and fewer than ten cases recorded annually across the entire United States, each death carries the weight of terrible rarity — and now, two have fallen in the same place, in the same season, prompting a community an