cw death
A Florida resident has died of a rare infection caused by a brain-eating amoeba after using unboiled tap water to clean their sinuses, local and federal officials say.
The Florida Health Department said the case involves a resident of Charlotte County but specific details were not immediately released. The CDC said the patient died on Monday.
The resident, whose identity has not been made public, is believed to have contracted Naegleria Fowleri after using unboiled tap water to rinse their sinuses daily, according to the CDC.
“DOH-Charlotte, as part of a multi-agency response, is continuing to investigate how this infection occurred and is working with the local public utilities to identify any potential links and make any necessary corrective actions,” the health department said.
Naegleria Fowleri can infect people when water containing the single-celled organism enters the body through the nose, usually while swimming or diving in ponds, lakes or rivers. In rare cases it can also be found in pipes connected to tap water.
“When water contaminated with Naegleria is sniffed up the nose, the ameba can travel to the brain,” according to the CDC website. “This causes the disease Primary Amebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM), which destroys brain tissue and usually results in death.”
Symptoms usually occur between 1 and 12 days after infection and may include headache, fever, nausea and vomiting. These symptoms may progress to a stiff neck, confusion, seizures and other neurological symptoms.
An infection with the brain-eating amoeba is nearly always fatal, killing 153 out of 157 patients since the early 1960s. Most cases were found in southern U.S. states, especially Texas (39) and Florida (38).
Although Naegleria Fowleri is a heat-loving ameba and is usually found in warm freshwater environments, recent infections have also been found in northern U.S. states as cooler regions have become warmer and drier.
This just reminds me of how I have been hearing people talk about how we need to apply world systems theory fractally and how California and New York are the Imperial cores within the US and there are semi-periphery areas within the borders of the U.S. relative to more prosperous areas. As inequality increases and we have further degradation of infrastructure, the maladies of the periphery will be found more and more in the Rust Belt and the rural South.
problem with that analysis is that impoverished chuds are voting for it to be done to themselves and their neighbors. the politics and economies of lib blue states are not why the former confederacy makes itself into a christofascist hellhole.
The issue is that poor people do not vote. While the Democrats have never been a real working class party, after the neoliberal turn and their bet on the fact that "poor and non-white voters have nowhere to go" so they only had to take into account the concerns of white suburban "swing voters". So voting is disproportionate among almost all axes of privilege, White people vote more than non-white, wealthy more than poor, etc. And the fact that the Democrats are the lesser of two evils in that they just double down on all the deregulation and disinvestment in infrastructure, rather than actively push it forward, means that they are not really seen as a real alternative in these issues.
The other point, further delving into this issue is that the Democrats are just an alternate faction of capital in terms of the interest they represent; there is some superficial logic in terms of voting with your boss and for the extractive industries that your boss is involved with to increase the chance you will have a job the next year. Along with the fact that in rural communities the local gentry will be taste setters and be seen as local leaders and philanthropists helping the community, further giving the working class in the region reason to vote for such interests, due to the poor alternatives offered by the Democrats.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/