Don't talk to me about life..

This story caught my eye today, it's about a boy who went for a swim in a Californian hot spring and two weeks later was dead. The cause of his demise was a "brain-eating" Amoeba that he ingested whilst swimming in the warm water which quite literally attacked his brain causing swelling and death. Apparently this amoeba is known to science and, although very rare indeed, there have been around 40 cases in the last 10 years. Fortunately there seems to be an effective treatment if caught early but it involves administering a cancer drug and inducing medical hypothermia, i.e. cooling the body down to slow the critters reproductive cycle whilst the drug kills them. Nature is certainly red in tooth and claw, sometimes it seems that existential threats emerge from the most unlikely places. No wonder our ancestors invented supernatural agents to explain stuff like this, even with modern science it's difficult to believe how tightly life in our biosphere is interlinked.