Brain Eating Amoeba Fears Grow In The U.S. After Deaths

And the flames are being fanned by news of a second victim this month. The ‘outbreak’ of the amoeba, which grows in stagnant water passages, is so far confined to Virginia. The parasite is believed to have killed three dozen people in the past ten years and affects its victims by causing meningitis. So far it’s reported that only children are most the vulnerable and the spread of the amoeba might be a seasonal thing.

Of course, the concern from parents will likely dissuade swimming in open pools of untreated water. The amoeba, known as Naegleria fowleri, usually enters the body through the nose then proceeds to trigger symptoms like headaches, nausea, and fever. Unfortunately, it cannot be treated with medicine.

Update: Less than a day after the initial reports about a second victim, a third has now been confirmed dead from the nefarious amoeba. A 16 year old girl from Florida was the latest casualty. Uh oh, it’s spreading.

There’s a chance the recent chain of events involving Naegleria fowleri might break into mainstream news and become a hot story for the next few weeks. While the news barrage might be tiresome, it’s probably best (if you’re in the United States in general, Virginia in particular) to confine swimming activity to a couple of showers a day. That sounds horrible! Hey, at least you can use soap a lot.

Source Yahoo News

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14 Year Old Gets A Bionic Arm After Writing Letter

In a rare chain of events that would make a decent Hollywood tear-jerker, a 14 year old lad from Berkshire got a new arm from a Scottish robotics company courtesy of Mercedes. That’s a lot of parties involved if you ask us, but the backstory is rather complicated.

See, dear Matthew is missing a limb. It wasn’t cut off in a lightsaber duel or the tragic result of an accident. For Matthew it was congenital. He’s been making do with a prosthetic hand for ages until he wrote a cheeky letter to the Mercedes F1 team GP Petronas.

What happened next was Mercedes reached out to the needy teenager and commissioned Scottish based robotics geniuses Touch Bionics to create the iLimb Pulse. Now fitted to Matthew’s arm, the iLimb is a very impressive piece of articulated hardware; the moving fingers plus Bluetooth capability puts it in a league of its own. There’s no human-tissue-over-a-metallic-exoskeleton claptrap though, unlike a T800, Matthew’s new hand is silicone and plastic.

Since his arm got attached, Matthew has been looking forward to school–he attends Reading–and other activities. These include karate, sports, and a burning desire to become an engineer for F1. Oh yes, during a rare factory visit just for Matthew, Mercedes claimed they weren’t paying for the arm and would fork the bill to sponsors. Oh cripes man, that’s just too suspicious for comfort. Why is a photogenic picture-perfect teenage lad with a sob story in cahoots with a major automaker? Anyone want to cry out ‘PR stunt’! Anyway, good luck to Matthew and his newfound hand.

Source Telegraph

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