What Is Going To Eat Your Brain Next?

Naegleria fowleri is a single-celled living organism that lives in warm, fresh water, according to the CDC. (It’s not actually an amoeba, despite the colloquial term for it.) It can travel up your nose while swimming in a lake or stream, multiply, and proceed to eat your brain. It has a 99 percent fatality rate, since only one person in the US has ever been documented surviving the infection. (There have also been several incidents in the US in recent years of people getting the parasite from using a neti pot.) Still, it’s a rare occurrence — between 2002 and 2011, there were only 32 infections in the U.S. Four deaths in a year is well within the recent average. But as the CDC points out, the organism “grows best at higher temperatures.” That might be a good reason to worry about whether higher temperatures caused by climate change will make it worse…

— Is global warming going to result in an epidemic of nose-invading singe-celled organisms whose insatiable hunger for human brains will doom the very survival of the human race? Sure, why the hell not. I for one am planning to stay out of the water.

Photo by Konstantin Chagin, via Shutterstock