Because of the spikes? Haha yes. But Lowes are like a subculture that That has now entered middle age and has always just been like harmless teens with cute makeup trying to rebel these things are literally little killers so I’d say they’re far closer to clowns than juggalo’s.
That amoeba, alongside rabies, is one of the things that scares me half to death. If you start showing symptoms, death is all but certain.
About a year back I went swimming in the Lake of The Ozarks at the border between MO and AR. I cannon-balled into the water, forgetting to plug my nose. Got a shot of lake water straight into my pathways and spent the next 2 weeks utterly terrified.
Obviously I'm fine but About a week after that, news popped up that someone who swam in the water probably within a week or two of me got it and died. Now I'm not touching lake water unless I have noseplugs.
Edit: Corrected the arkansas abbreviation. Thanks redditors.
Agreed. I honestly don't worry about me too much personally, like it would suck but it's my daughter I have anxiety about. She loves water, water parks, and animals. We just had an absurd situation where like hundreds of children were exposed to rabid goats from a traveling petting zoo. I think they both bother me because you basically don't know you have either until you're symptomatic and at that point it's basically a death sentence. I acknowledge it's irrational because we're all far more likely to go in a car accident and I don't really give that a second thought, but still...
I think it's because of how horrible it sounds psychologically compared to something like dying in a car crash. With a car crash, it's quick, and it's done. But finding out you have rabies is like the equivalent of finding out you have terminal cancer, but with far less time and even more pain.
Psychologically, I just can't think of anything scarier than the moment you display a symptom, realizing you're going to die soon. I think a car crash is far less psychologically terrifying than that.
A friend of mine died from this amoeba after rafting in the Catawba River. I've been terrified to put my head under any kind of water since their passing. One day they were complaining about some head and neck pains, then they were in the hospital, the next thing I knew they had passed. It is really fucking scary how quickly it escalated and it was too late by the time they figured out what was wrong.
Oh, the essentially unkillable infectious proteins you can't treat at all that slowly destroy your brain. The way they spread reminds me a bit about the theory of the possibility of a false vacuum state in the universe. Once the decay started, it can't ever stop.
At least you probably die a nicer death than with rabies, albeit a longer one.
Or you can move to a cold climate. They dont survive the winter, so it's free. Likewise, they cant survive in salt water, so swimming in the ocean is safe as well
Dudeeeee same here, rabies and this are my two biggest fears.
I had one time where a bat bit me while I was doing yard work and I immediately went to the hospital to start my series of shots, no way in hell was I going to wait around on that 🤣
Needles to say I was terrified for the first six months with a bunch of what if scenarios playing in my head.
This is like saying you won't drive on a stretch of road because someone once got into an accident and died there. There has been 1 documented case of brain eating amoebas in the Lake of the Ozarks since 1962.
There are 3 per year on average. Sooo many things to worry about in this world, this really doesn't need to be one of them.
So different thing, but i got bacterial meningitis from run off in lake water in Ontario. Tons of people swam in the same water as me. To describe what the immediate next 3 months of my life was like would basically be the same as dealing with late stage cancer. I was delusional from fever, barely ever lucid if at all, I went from being a tall athletic build to looking like a literal skeleton - 185 to 130lbs in 3 months. It took me 2 years to get back to fighting weight. I still get migraines and have vision issues and it's been 25 years.
Would you have kept me out of the water back then if you told me I had crazy low odds of being the one to get sick? No. I was young and would live forever, that could never happen to me.
But the people that had to witness what I went through sure as shit did not go swimming again in that lake.
Its all about perspective. Statistics are a funny thing. Chances make people feel safe. Others see it as an unacceptable risk.
If there were any bugs, your immune system seems to have taken care of them.
It’s not true that an amoeba in your nose has a 100% chance of reaching your brain. Your body’s strong immune defenses are there to protect you.
To this day I cant explain why, but these things TERRIFIED me when I was a kid. Would literally run out of the room screaming when they'd appear on TV.
I'm 44 and I still viscerally recall how it made me feel. So weird
I understand. I loved muppets but sometimes there were just certain ones I couldn't handle. Like fight or flight, nightmares, can't even walk in the same room where I know the VHS is kept. I'm 35 and still get so frightened by one specific puppet character. Like i want to throw up.
There are new theories of cognition that include single celled organisms and they are considered to be possessing intelligence. They definitely have agency and intelligence is defined as the ability to solve problems to achieve goals, so an amoeba can definitely do that. What their cognition covers is called a cognitive lightcone
The terrifying aspect of the brain eating amoeba is that they aren't even designed to do that. They just so happen to be perfectly fit to avoid detection and eat your brain due it being the only food avaliable. They would rather just be in the water eating bacteria and algae.
They are amoeba, which I incorrectly assumed meant that they pretty much take on any shape at all, and you could probably find them looking like anything you can imagine… but that’s not the case. However, they do go through three basic gross growth stages and the “screaming terror clown” is only one of them.
Swim in chlorinated water only. They can’t survive in chlorinated water, but also like. Don’t swim in old ass pools. There was this one pool, I can’t remember the name of it, but it had this wall where it was adjusted in to be standardized (the pool was built in the early 1900’s) and while the rest of the pool was chlorinated and filtered, behind this wall, old well water or river water or something was still there and every now and again the water would get kicked up and the amoebas would be released, so they had a weird pattern of infection, and they knew it was THIS pool, but they didn’t know HOW because the pool water would test clean.
Turns out, the amoebas would be released, someone would get infected, and by the time they showed symptoms again, the remaining amoeba in the open part of the pool would die from the chlorine, meaning their presence went unnoticed by labs until like 16 people died.
Looked it up, it happened in the 60’s in Czechoslovakia (ik it’s the Czech Republic and Slovakia now but back then it was still Czechoslovakia.)
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u/DracoNinja27 13h ago