An 8-year-old’s recent summer lake swim has led to a heartbreaking tragedy.
Last week, the Louisiana Department of Health reported that a resident, subsequently identified as Lillian Smart by her family, had contracted a rare infection of Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba that attacks the brains of those infected. Sadly, on Sunday, the family reported that Smart had succumbed to the highly fatal illness over the weekend. It’s only the fourth case of N. fowleri ever documented in the state, according to health officials.
“The injuries to her brain were too severe for her little body to recover from. Everyone did everything they could to keep her here,” her family wrote in a Facebook post to a group started to provide updates on her condition.
N. fowleri is a shapeshifting amoeba that lives in soil and warm freshwater. It typically only eats bacteria and isn’t dangerous to people when it’s swallowed from drinking water containing the amoeba. However, when the amoeba enters the body through the nose, it can sometimes migrate to the brain. From there, it will attack and kill brain cells, triggering a massive bout of inflammation. This infection is formally called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, or PAM.
According to the Louisiana Department of Health, symptoms of PAM typically start with “severe headache, fever, nausea and vomiting and progress to stiff neck, seizures, and coma that can lead to death.” People usually feel sick about five days after exposure, but it can take up to 12 days. And though doctors can try to treat PAM with an aggressive cocktail of drugs and other interventions, the infection remains nearly always fatal.
People often catch PAM from swimming in warm freshwater sources, such as lakes during the summertime, and that appears to be what happened to Smart in this case. Health officials say she likely acquired the infection while swimming in Lake Claiborne, located in northern Louisiana.
Thankfully, N. fowleri infections are incredibly rare. There have been only around 180 cases recorded in the U.S. between 1937 through 2025, according to the Louisiana Department of Health, with three cases prior to Smart reported in the state itself.
However, research has suggested that the global incidence of this infection is increasing in warmer parts of the world. And at least some scientists argue that climate change is and will continue to make N. fowleri a bigger problem over time. A study earlier this year revealed that the amoeba was commonly found in many recreational hot water springs across the western half of the country.
Louisiana officials have issued an advisory to health care providers in the area about the case. And though the odds of catching N. fowleri are low, the department adds that people swimming in warm freshwater sources should always assume there is a risk and take steps to further lower it. Namely, you should try to limit any water that goes up the nose while swimming, such as by pinching your nose shut or wearing nose clips when jumping in. People should also always use distilled, sterilized, or boiled and cooled tap water for nasal irrigation, since that’s another potential route of infection.
A highly effective vaccine for the human papillomavirus is looking even better than we hoped, thanks to new research that suggest HPV vaccination can prevent a variety of cancers, not just cervical cancer.
Researchers in Taiwan examined the medical records of over 1.4 million Americans, half of whom were vaccinated against HPV. Compared to unvaccinated people, HPV-vaccinated people were significantly less likely to develop cancers of the neck and head, they found.
The findings provide “real-world evidence supporting the potential broader benefits of HPV vaccination,” the authors wrote in their paper, published this month in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.
HPV is a ubiqutious passenger of humanity. Just about every person will catch the sexually transmitted virus at some point in their lives. However, there are actually around 200 types of HPV.
Many HPV types will go unnoticed and never cause any illness. Others cause unsightly but ultimately harmless growths that we call warts (these include genital warts). And certain high-risk HPV types can linger in the body and raise the chances of cancer. HPV vaccines are intended to prevent the most common high-risk HPV types (the vaccine currently available in the U.S. also prevents some types that cause warts).
These high-risk infections are responsible for the vast majority of cervical cancers in women, and studies have consistently shown that HPV vaccination programs are helping reduce the incidence of cervical cancer in conjunction with early screening. In some countries, these programs have been so successful that cervical cancer might already have been eradicated on a local level.
However, HPV is also a major leading cause of several other cancers that affect men and women, including head and neck cancers. And the current study researchers wanted to study how vaccination is affecting the incidence of these cancers as well.
The team analyzed medical records from a large database of U.S. patients across the country. They compared roughly 700,000 people vaccinated against HPV to a same-sized group of similar people who recieved other non-HPV vaccines, then tracked their outcomes for up to 13 years.
By the end of the study period, 40 people in the vaccinated group had been diagnosed with a head or neck cancer, compared to 130 people in the unvaccinated group, the researchers found. Vaccinated people were especially less likely to develop oropharyngeal cancers (the oropharynx is the middle part of the throat, behind the mouth).
Upon closer inspection, this associated risk reduction was only statistically significant among people who were first vaccinated between the ages of 9 to 26; vaccinated people in this age group were roughly 68% less likely to develop a head or neck cancer. This is probably because older people are more likely to have already caught high-risk HPV infections before they were vaccinated. The researchers did still observe a potential reduction in cancer risk even among older people, just not one that could be conclusively shown.
These findings can ultimately only demonstrate an association between HPV vaccination and reduced cancers of the head and neck, not a clear cause-and-effect relationship. And because HPV-related cancers tend to take years, even decades, to emerge following exposure, it will take more time to know just how effective vaccination is at reducing risk. That said, other studies have found a similar link between taking these vaccines and a lower chance of these and other non-cervical cancers, including penile cancer in men.
Unfortunately, though the HPV vaccine is now widely recommended for everyone starting as early as age 9, vaccination rates are lower in the U.S. than many similar high-income countries. As of 2024, only about 63% of U.S. teens were up-to-date with their HPV shots, whereas countries like Denmark and Spain are expected to reach 90% coverage by decade’s end.
For around 60 years, doctors have routinely given infants a vitamin K shot to prevent uncontrolled bleeding.
The EPA has revised its assessment of the health risks posed by the carcinogen, less than a year after the Biden administration issued its own verdict.