Second Vietnamese dies from brain-eating amoeba

Doctors in Ho Chi Minh City have just announced the death of a 6-year-old boy killed by brain-eating amoeba about two months after the first amoeba death was recorded in Phu Yen central province.

The boy, who lived in Tan Binh District, was on Thursday confirmed to die of brain-eating amoeba or known scientifically as Naegleria Fowleri.

Phan Van Hieu, director of Ho Chi Minh City’s Forensic Medicine Center, confirmed with Tuoi Tre that the boy’s tested samples proved positive for amoeba after the center applied the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique.

The boy reportedly showed fever symptoms and stopped breathing before being admitted into a hospital in district 6, a report said.

Hieu said the boy's sudden death is the first amoeba casethat the center has found.

He added that the amoeba not only lives in freshwater but also underground and the brain-eating amoeba is "a very rare disease but avoidable".

Parasitologists in HCMC, however, claimed that it’s impossible the amoeba lives underground and expressed their doubts about the boy’s death, saying that he was kept away from freshwater in ponds and lakes which are believed to be home to the deadly amoeba.

Therefore, they suggested that the case should be reviewed by a medical council.

As previously reported, 25-year-old P.V.T, a temporary resident in Ho Chi Minh City, returned to his native province of Phu Yen in mid-July and dove to catch clams in a fishpond. On July 29, he developed high fever and a headache, after which he took medicine, but the condition worsened.

One day later, he was hospitalized at the Nhan Dan Gia Dinh Hospital in HCMC, where doctors suspected that T had been inflected with a kind of amoeba. T was later transferred to the Tropical Diseases Hospital where he did not recover since the amoeba had moved from his nose to his brain and caused meningitis, said doctors.

The patient later fell into a deep coma and experienced three cardiac arrests and three respiratory arrests before he died on July 31.

On August 21, a molecular biological test on a sample from the victim confirmed that he had been infected with the deadly amoeba species, which was discovered in 1965 and is sometimes called ‘the brain-eating amoeba’.