The 14-year-old teenager from Houston, Texas, has died after fighting for more than a week a rare brain-eating disease.
According to a relative, the 14-year-old boy has encountered a rare amoeba while swimming in Sam Houston State Park Lake, just 11 kilometers north of Houston. The boy, named Michael Riley Jr., has been an Olympian athlete. The energetic honors student had qualified three times for Junior Olympics cross-country probe.
He has shown the first symptoms of sickness after swimming with his cross country team on Aug. 13. The boy's family says that he became disoriented and developed a headache after swimming in the lake nearby Houston.
According to reports, Riley has been listed as a patient at Texas Children's Hospital. However, a spokesman for the hospital declined to provide information, invoking the rules for patient confidentiality.
According to sources, the amoeba the boy contracted while swimming in the lake entered his nasal passage and made its way into the child's brain. Following the infection, the incoming high school freshman was diagnosed with Primary Amebic Meningoencephalitis (men-ingo-in-SEPHALITE-us).
Riley's cousin, Jennifer Hohman declared Sunday that the boy he was taken to Texas Children's Hospital. The doctors decided to place him in a medically induced coma until tests have shown that he couldn't breathe without the support and he had lost all brain function. Then the hospital decided to disconnect the ventilator and death of the boy were confirmed by the medical staff.
According to health officials, this is not the first case of this nature and the brain-eating amoeba already infected 35 people in the U.S. between the years 2005 and 2014. Doctors say that the brain-eating amoeba is typically found in warm freshwater. Officials with the Center for Disease Control say that in case of infection with the amoeba the medical condition is fatal 95 percent of the time. Three people have died from it so far this year.
Riley's family has been counting on a GoFundMe page and an experimental treatment from the CDC. They declared in a statement on their Facebook page that "Michael John Riley Jr. lost his battle on this earth but won a victory for his place in the arms of our Lord Jesus Christ".
