ORLANDO, Fla. – Doctors at AdventHealth say they have developed a test that can detect infections from brain-eating amoebas.
The laboratory test detects three of the most common amoebas contracted after swimming in lakes or rivers, or from exposure to other sources of freshwater.
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“It is highly specific for these three,” said Dr. Jose Alexander, medical director of the microbiology, virology department for AdventHealth. “We are waiting on the test to identify down to two amoebas in one amount of spinal fluid.”
Alexander said that before this, there was no rapid diagnostic for the amoeba officially, and test specimens had to be preserved for transportation from the hospital to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The new test cuts the process down to hours.
His team began developing the test but had to stop working on it because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were able to pick it back up this year.
According to the CDC, there have been 154 known brain-eating amoeba cases in the U.S. since 1962, and only four of those people have survived.
The doctors were joined by Steve and Shelly Smelski of Sanford, whose son Jordan died in 2014 from a brain-eating amoeba infection contracted while on vacation in Costa Rica. They founded the Jordan Smelski Foundation for Amoeba Awareness in his honor.
“This inspires me. It’s, like, the fact that AdventHealth cares,” Shelly Smelski said. “The fact that people are taking this serious, so when we do events like this, I feel very encouraged. It’s different in that when Jordan was diagnosed, they did take a spinal tap, and then they ran the fluid, and he was diagnosed with meningitis, so they did really not have the proper test to test for amoebic infection.”
The Smelski family worked with AdventHealth to help develop the test. They said while such infections are normally called rare, they’re not widely diagnosed and there is not enough information, so they feel this test will help more people get a proper diagnosis.
“If you don’t know how to diagnose it, if you don’t know how to treat it, if you don’t know how to identify it, then how you can call it rare?” Shelly Smelski said.
“As a parent, it is not rare if it happened to your child,” Steve Smelski said.
Shelly Smelski said that these new tests may help medical experts act more quickly in the case of an amoeba-involved infection. She told News 6 that these innovations are a way for her to honor the memory of her son.
“The grief was so intense, and we though, ‘Wow, we lost our purpose,’” she said. “And what we realized is even in his passing, he is still very much our purpose, and we want his life to live on through us and through the work that we do.”
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