Meet Naegleria fowleri, aka the brain-eating amoeba. Said amoeba is very much in the news following the death of Lauren Seitz, a recent high school graduate from Westerville, OH who contact the disease while rafting at the National Whitewater Center outside Charlotte.
Naegleria fowleri is commonly found in warm, fresh water. You can’t contract an infection though unless you get water containing the amoeba up your nose. As CBS News explains:
Only 138 people nationwide have been stricken by the disease between 1962 and 2015, according to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. Florida and Texas have had the most cases with 34 each in that time. North Carolina had four cases prior to Seitz, none of them involving the whitewater center, while Ohio is one of 32 states without a recorded case over the five-decade span. All five cases last year were fatal. They were in California, Oklahoma, Arizona, and two in Texas. The most recent was in Texas last August.
The National Whitewater Center is in the business of putting people in rafts and having them sail through rough water, where they standing a good chance of getting flipped into the water and, yes, quite possibly getting water up their nose. A CDC examination shows that the center most definitely has the amoeba in its water and at levels that are very much higher than those found in natural settings. That would be a problem.
Which brings us to this, from the Charlotte Observer:
Mecklenburg County tests the water in public pools, including parks and apartment complexes, once a year for pH and disinfectant levels. State regulations require public pool owners to test pH and chlorine levels daily.
But no such standards exist for the Whitewater Center, which attracts hundreds of thousands of people a year to concrete channels that recirculate 12 million gallons of water for rafting and kayaking.
“This is a classic example of where new technology outpaces laws that preceded it,” said state Sen. Joel Ford, a Mecklenburg County Democrat. “When this law was passed, there was no Whitewater Center.”
In retrospect, the possibility of contracting a brain-eating amoeba infection at a man-made whitewater course would seem an obvious danger that would need to be addressed. Industry and public health officials apparently didn’t recognize it as such. The National Whitewater Center sits on land rented from Mecklenburg County and public money went into building the facility. As a Mecklenburg County resident, I would have hoped that the county’s due diligence of the project would have identified this concern and included a lease condition mandating effective water quality checks. The lease only requires a weekly check for fecal coliform.
Regulating a whitewater center as if it were a massive swimming pool may well not be the right solution, so perhaps the Senate was wise to not rush through immediate regulation. But make no mistake, this very much is a public health issue and effective regulations for such operations must be developed.
