A 12-year-old girl is fighting for her life after she contracted a brain-eating amoeba mostly likely from a water park in Arkansas.
Kali Hardig was rushed to hospital by her mother a day after going swimming at the Willow Springs Water Park.
“I couldn’t get her fever down. She started vomiting,” Mrs Hardig told the Christian Post. “She’d say her head hurt really bad. She cried, and she would just look at me and her eyes would just kind of roll.”
Doctors put her in an induced coma to stabilise her condition, which has been diagnosed as parasitic meningitis – a rare and usually deadly disease caused by a brain-eating amoeba.
Only two people known to have survived the condition in North America, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Arkansas Department of Health released a statement regarding Hardig’s case, explaining that the amoeba that caused her particular kind of meningitis, called Naegleria fowleri, can be found in warm streams, rivers and lakes, as well as soil.
Naegleria fowleri isn’t transmitted between humans and is usually contracted by entering through the nose of humans while they are in the water.
Willow Springs Water Park was linked with another case of parasitic meningitis in 2010.
“We, David and Lou Ann Ratliff, as general management of Willow Springs Water Park, have received new information regarding Naegleria fowleri, and have elected to close the park as of July 25 at the request of the Arkansas Department of Health,” the managers said in a statement. “Though the odds of contracting Naegleria are extremely low, they are just not good enough to allow our friends or family to swim.
“For the thousands of people who love Willow Springs, we will be taking this time to determine the feasibility of installing a solid bottom to the lake. We will not ever reopen as a sand bottom lake,” the pair said.
Kali Hardig remains in a medically induced coma at the Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.
