Naegleria Fowleri

Naegleria fowleri, popularly called the brain-eating amoeba, is a free-living single-celled organism that normally feeds on bacteria in warm fresh water such as lakes, rivers, hot springs and poorly chlorinated swimming pools, but can become a rare and almost always fatal human pathogen. Infection occurs when contaminated water is forced up the nose, typically during swimming or diving, allowing the amoeba to travel along the olfactory nerve into the brain, where it causes a severe brain infection called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. The organism can shift between an amoeboid crawling form and a temporary flagellated swimming form. It is named for Malcolm Fowler, the Australian pathologist who published some of the first documented cases of the disease it causes, beginning in 1965.