KARACHI: With the advent of monsoon, as was feared earlier, the ‘brain-eating’ amoeba, technically called as naegleria fowleri, caused the first death of the year in the city and the province, officials in the Sindh health ministry said on Friday.

Officials identified the victim as Zahid Khan, a 30-year-old man living in Baldia Town. They said the victim was admitted to a private hospital in a precarious condition three days back.

He was suffering from high fever with all symptoms that later confirmed that he was a victim of naegleria, a lethal condition the sufferers of which could not survive in 99.9 per cent cases.

“We got the report that he died today,” said a senior official in the ministry. “He was the first victim of naegleria this year.”

Although the danger associated with the lethal disease was feared before the advent of monsoon, the provincial government has not released funds and resources required for efficient functioning of the committee it formed last year to check its increasing dangers. The committee eventually went dormant when it found no backing from the government.

Initially, the committee worked on its own and shared its primary findings with the media, which shockingly revealed that most neighbourhoods of the city were being supplied with water not chlorinated at all.

Chlorination is the key method to kill the germ and keep the life-taking disease at bay. Another way is to use boiled water while cleaning nose as the germ enters through the nasal cavity of its victim and attacks the brain.

Recently, officials and experts had warned that when monsoon came closer its germs would get breeding grounds in stagnant rainwater and water stored in tyres at shops and threaten life as it did last year when more than a dozen people died because of it.

The deadly disease killed 14 people in 2014.

The committee, called the focal group for naegleria, during its first activities last year collected samples of water and results showed that more than half of the city was supplied with water chlorinated much less than the desired level. Even the teams found no chlorination at all at more than 90pc of the pumping houses of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) risking the lives of millions in the metropolis.

Officials said the committee was provided with no funds for the vehicles and fuel required to collect water samples from the length and breadth of the metropolis. The work has virtually come to a standstill because of such resource constraints.

The authorities’ claim of having invested heavily in public awareness campaigns about naegleria has failed to impress anyone. The pamphlets it published might have changed hands in public places but none of them was seen pasted inside hospitals or at the ablution places or outside the mosques where people could contract the disease by rinsing their noses with unsafe and poorly chlorinated water.

Officials earlier said the germ could potentially approach the victim’s brain through the nasal cavity during ablution at home or in mosques where water supplies were not safely chlorinated or boiled.

The appalling rise in the frequency of deaths because of the fatal infection has exposed the authorities’ claims of taking adequate measures to curb the germ, which killed 39 people in the last three years.

The dangerous amoeba, which survives on the bacteria in warm waters and enters human brain through the nasal cavity and eats up its tissues, could only be decimated through proper chlorination or boiling of water.

Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis is defined in medical literature as a rare but typically fatal infection caused by Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba found in rivers, lakes, springs, drinking water networks and poorly chlorinated swimming pools.

The illness attacks a healthy person, three to seven days after exposure to contaminated water with symptoms of headache and slight fever, in some cases associated with sore throat and rhinitis (commonly called stuffy nose).

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2016