A Seattle woman unwittingly injected deadly brain-eating amoebas into her nasal cavity when she rinsed out her sinuses with tap water, according to a new report.
Doctors performing brain surgery on the 69-year-old woman in January were shocked when what they had initially thought was a tumor, based on a CT scan, turned out to be a swarm of deadly amoebas munching away at her insides.
“When I operated on this lady, a section of her brain about the size of a golf ball was bloody mush,” Dr. Charles Cobbs, neurosurgeon at Swedish Medical Center, told the Seattle Times. “There were these amoeba all over the place just eating brain cells. We didn’t have any clue what was going on, but when we got the actual tissue, we could see it was the amoeba.”