Is nothing safe:
A sinus-flushing device used to relieve colds and allergies has been linked to a deadly brain-eating amoeba.
Louisiana’s state health department issued a warning about neti pots – which look like mini watering cans, that are used by pouring salty water through one nostril.
It follows two recent deaths – a 51-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man from the ‘brain-eating amoeba’ Naegleria fowleri.
It is thought the amoeba entered their brains when they used the devices.
A brain eating amoeba would certainly explain some of my recent posts.
Baud
Let this be a lesson to the kids — Always practice safe sinus rinsing.
srv
Boil before snorting.
Dr. Squid
Louisiana has parasite-filled water that they refuse to check or clean (soshulism!), but yeah, let’s blame the neti pots.
Joel
Well, at the very least, if you’re going to flush something up your nose, you should sterilize it, first.
catclub
Did the article suggest that the water they used was treated city water and still had the amoeba? Or make no statement on that? My understanding is that treated (chlorinated water) should not have that bacteria.
I also wonder if the salt solution was not strong enough.
Had to imagine amoeba surviving the very high salinity water it should be.
lamh35
as a Micobiologist, I cringe just thinking that people need to be told that ‘Tap water is safe for drinking, but not for irrigating your nose.’ In my head all I hear is…”Ah duh”.
LiberalTarian
Yeah, they didn’t get the brain eating amoeba from the neti pot. Jeesh. All the way from India! LOL.
Comrade Mary
Boil your water like I do, and you’ll be just finARRRGGGHHHHHHHHHgurglethump
Comrade Mary
(Pro tip: cool down the water after boiling.)
lamh35
@catclub:
Naeglera fowleri actually prefers saline environments.
Steeplejack
I read that story last night and took it with a huge grain of salt (heh). It’s by no means clear yet that the neti pot–or tapwater–was the medium by which the amoeba got in.
N.B. Your recent posts have been no crazier than usual, so put your mind at rest on that score.
uptown
Suffern ACE
@Steeplejack: The second he rests his mind, though, the amoeba will try to steal it.
PurpleGirl
I just heard the lede to the story as I was changing channels on the teevee early this morning and my first thought was… that’s the thing John Cole uses, I wonder if he’s heard the story yet.
Mnemosyne
Heh. I was waiting for this post after I saw the story yesterday. And, yes, to me the problem would seem to be more with poor water treatment in Louisiana than with any inherent danger of using neti pots.
Jamey
Why, cos the amoeba died of starvation?
/ZING!
(ps: I second Steeplejack re: your recent posts)
CarolDuhart2
One thing is for sure: whatever you do, use distilled water for everything like this. Distilled water is guaranteed sterile, unlike what comes through your tap through systems.
Keith G
Which other front pagers use neti pots?
Bill E Pilgrim
Oh neti.
All this time I’ve been using a yeti pot. And wondering why all that happened was that my feet got bigger.
Quicksand
Neti pots are the devil’s work.
Eljai
@srv: I agree with Comrade Mary. After you boil the water, just remember to let it cool down before snorting. Learned that one the hard way.
cathyx
Why wouldn’t those bacteria affect you if you just drank or washed with the water?
Keith G
@cathyx: In short, gut acids.
wrb
@Bill E Pilgrim:
All that you noticed.
Check for poop in your hair.
Gordon, The Big Express Engine
@PurpleGirl: Ditto. Pretty funny… Hmmmm… a whatie pot..? Neti pot??? (lightbulb goes on). That thing that cole blogged about last winter!
Maude
This goes along with don’t put beans up your nose.
Blowing your nose does help.
Mnemosyne
@Maude:
A neti pot does have some proven benefits, especially with allergies since it lets you wash the allergens like pollen or dust out of your nasal passages where they’ve gotten trapped.
The real lesson seems to be Don’t drink the water in Louisiana ’cause their water treatment sucks.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
No, no. You’re supposed to use isotonic solution (i.e. the same salt concentration as your cells) for a sinus rinse, which won’t do anything to microorganisms. If you use saline that’s strong enough to kill the bugs, it’ll burn like crazy when you rinse with it. Basically, the salt kills bugs by dehydrating them. If it’s strong enough to dehydrate the bugs, it’ll also dehydrate the hell out of your sinuses, which is not the desired effect.
Bill E Pilgrim
Didn’t I hear about a treatment for this where they put small fish up your nose that eat only the amoebas and leave your brain intact?
Course then they need pelicans to get rid of the fish, and by the time it’s over you’re putting amoebas back in to get rid of the elephants….
Svensker
@Bill E Pilgrim:
That is so gross.
The pedicure thing is almost as gross and it’s true. Yech.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Svensker: But just think about all the languages you’d be able to understand.
Citizen_X
Some of us are just worried about them coming for our pot.
Mjaum
You guys have scary tap water.
khead
An amoeba? You should be a lot more worried about your neti pot exploding due to stuff released from fracking.
p.a.
Dave Barry would say brain eating amoeba is a great name for a rock band.
Lojasmo
I scoffed at the directions regarding boiling the water first. Of course I live in sochulist Minnesota.
John Weiss
@catclub: Amoebae (?) aren’t bacteria, they’re animals. I’m not so sure that chlorination would do the trick. In my youth when I traveled the third world with iodine, which will kill all the nasties.
James E. Powell
Do you have to keep it boiling for a while to be safe, or is it all over when the tea kettle sings?
Chuck Butcher
Gee, there’s a reason people use their noses for unapproved fun substances and that would have a bit to do with shit that’s safe to drink not working so good.
kay
I scratched my cornea on a branch once, and I did not realize that was what I had done, I thought I had something (bark from the branch) in my eye, so I rinsed and rinsed and rinsed…
And ended up with this crazy, roaring incredibly painful eye infection, where they had to give me novocaine eye drops and antibiotics.
Just rinsing with water.
suzanne
Oh shit. I adore my neti pot. It’s the only thing that loosens the enormous desert boogers I get. I always use my reverse-osmosis water, but I’l boil from now on.
Once I used it with white vinegar. I regretted that.
And Another Thing...
OK guys, this is a classic BJuice thread and why this is a great place to hang. A slightly odd subject and plenty of humor. It’s so much more fun than when some ugly troll comes around spewing poison.
Thanx.
Svensker
@suzanne:
OK, definitely in the TMI category. :)
Svensker
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Hey, you edited your post after I commented on it, removing the point of my comment. Is that nice? Is that fair? There are no elephants in a pedicure.
Delia
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I believe you’re thinking of the Babel fish. They don’t fit in a neti pot.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Svensker: Oh sorry. I do that sometimes.
Actually what started me in that direction was that this story reminded me of reading about bacteria in pedicure footbaths causing these hideous infections, and then I remembered reading also that they do those with live fish now, which is definitely one of the weirder things I’d ever seen.
And yes, whoever mentioned it, “languages” was a reference to the Babel Fish, well done.
HeartlandLiberal
I will see your neti pot and raise you a sinu-pulse nasal irrigation system.
Towards the end of the sinus infection from hell last year, so bad that on CT scans made for the first two months after specialist realized how bad the infection was, you could not see my sinuses. The sinus cavities are supposed to show up as large black voids in the skull in the images. I had no sinuses, according to the images at the beginning. You could not see them, they were all totally filled with infection and impacted. Sort of explained why I had been feeling so totally crappy and could not shake cold symptoms after over a month of trying.
It took four months and four rounds of increasingly strong antibiotics to finally clear up, aided by use of a neti pot, which I began using after the first month. Trust me, to be real blunt about this, I learned more during this period about the various colors and significance for signs of infection the colors of snot could take than I ever dreamed I wanted to know.
In the final month I discovered the sinu-pulse.
This devise pulses water into the nasal cavity. Think of it as a neti pot on steroids. It sped up the final healing and clearing of my sinuses.
I have continued using it almost every day, pretty much like brushing teeth, and the last two colds that have tried to take hold on me I have treated with aggressive use of the device, every couple of hours. with two pints of water and two teaspoons of salt per round. In the past, such colds would have taken hold and lasted at least a couple of weeks, often developing severe symptoms, often leading to sinus infection. These past two I beat back in 4-6 days.
Also, heed the appreciation of the ancient Romans and their respect for hot baths. Soak the whole body in a tub of water deep enough to cover you to your chest while lying back. Put a small towel over your head covering upper half of our face including the eyes and nose, leaving the nostrils exposed, and with a plastic pitcher ladle from the tub and pour hot water on the towel for 10-14 minutes. It works wonders for breaking up the sinus congestion so they can drain and get rid of the infection.
As for the idiots in Louisiana, I would say they have some pretty bad water treatment facilities, and that is the cause of their problem. It would make sense in that case to at least filter the water you are using or boil it, if you can’t trust your water system. Fortunately, we have a pretty reliable and safe supply of tap water where we live.
Thymezone
I have always assumed that brain eating amoeba was part of the standard toolkit for bloggers. Not sure what the big deal is.
Glen Tomkins
A saline flush is a good way to clear sinuses, but there is no reason on God’s green earth to have a special pot for the purpose, or to leave your saline lying around in any sort of vessel, specialized or not, for days on end. It could have been tapwater that wasn’t chlorinated enough to kill the Naeglaria, but it’s also possible that these folks left solution in the pot indefinitely to avoid having to make it up fresh every use.
Though generally pretty harmless, you are squirtng water up into anatomy that is right next to the brain. It’s probably not a great idea to do the flushing daily, because even a very low risk intervention like nasal saline flush is not a zero risk intervention, and you do it often enough, and your chances of even a very low prob complication climb into “happen some day” territory.
By all means squirt away if you’re having symptoms that suggest a sinus is blocked, because that could lead to an infection that would require an antibiotic. The risk of allergic reaction to just about any antibiotic is so much higher than the risk of amebic meningitis no matter what the water source or how long you’ve left the saline in the pot, that it is a clear winner to do anything to relieve a blockage short of an antibiotic. But find some other way to deal with other symptoms, such as post-nasal drip, that are annoying but won’t kill you.
300baud
Glen, you seem awfully confident for somebody who apparently doesn’t know what a neti pot is.
You use a special pot because the shape of it makes it much easier to properly rinse your sinuses. The typical neti pot only holds enough water for 1 rinse (or less; I’ll often fill it twice), so I have no idea where you get the notion that people would leave it full of water.
I had sinus issues and migraines for years; regular use of my neti pot has made a huge difference in my life. Unless you have some actual stats or studies backing up your “happen some day” handwaving, I’m going to carry on doing what I’m doing.
electricgrendel
Um. Isn’t the problem the nasty water and not the neti pot? Or are they saying that there exists in each neti pot a worm hole to a universe filled with brain eating amoeba?
Glen Tomkins
@300baud: If you had triggered migraines caused by blocked sinuses, then absolutely, you come out ahead even if you drain with fluid known to have amebae in it. But that condition is pretty rare. No way that the practice of daily sinus irrigation should be touted as somehting for the general public.
I drain fairly often myself (but not even close to every day), because I have chronic sinusitis that occasionally blocks the sinuses up completely, and it would move to acute sinusitis if not unblocked. But I have always found a large spoon completely adequate to the task of holding the right amount of solution in place for instillation. I can’t imagine the need for any specialized device.
And any specialized device does carry the risk that it will serve as a site for the growth of stuff you don’t want growing there. The spoon and coffeee cup I use gets washed after each use along with the rest of the dirty dishes. Leave appreciable liquid sitting in any vessel and the process speeds up, but even trace amounts serve as culture medium. Wash the thing daily if you use it daily is the safe approach.
Glen Tomkins
@electricgrendel: The Naeglaria don’t have to bore through a wormhole (amebahole?)to get into drinking water. Naeglaria can be found in most fresh water, surface or ground. Since many communities do not have to chlorinate their drinking water at all because of the absence of coliform bacteria from the ground water they draw, a lot of the tapwater in this country probably has Naeglaria.
Amebic meningitis is very rare, and occurs very sporadically, but, up until this thing with the neti pots, it was associated with swimming in fresh, non-chlorinated, water, either non-chlorinated swimming pools or bodies of fresh surface water. Since a whole lot more people are exposed, much more often, to drinking tapwater that isn’t chlorinated, than swim in fresh water, there has to be something about the swimming that gets the Naeglaria into the brain. We think it’s that, when you swim, the amebae get way up in the nasopharynx near the cribriform plate, where the olfactory nervelets get though the skull on their way to the smell center of the brain.
Now, when you try to draw conclusions from very rare events, you’re inherently out on a limb statistically. But, if the epidemiologists did this right, and they carefully determined that these two neti pot users did not have any fresh-water swimming exposure that you could attribute their meningitis to, even just two events allows you to make a tentative determination that neti pots are a problem. Amebic meningitis is so rare, and it’s even rarer in people without recent freshwater swimming exposure, that it overcomes even an n of 2.
Sasha
It would explain your earliest posts better.
cecily
well…first of all can’t we get water up our nose in the shower? and doctors have people using the western version of nasal wash with tap water all the time. Our kids go under water in the tub…we swim in lakes and ponds…OYE…I’d really like to hear more from the medical community on this one. Is it possible the area these deaths occurred has more risky water?