There is a horrible infectious disease that you have probably never heard of.

It's called balaumuthia.

It's basically your brain-eating amoeba.

They don't really know how it's transmitted probably through some sort of soil exposure.

It causes encephalitis, which is swelling in parts of the brain. It can kill you in

relatively short order. It's extremely rare, and so there's been very little study of it.

That is Heather Stone. She's a health science policy analyst in the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA has not approved any treatments for balamuthia,

but that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any treatments.

Three or four years ago, a clinician in San Francisco at University of California

treated the first patient with a drug called nitroxylene,

which had been approved in Europe for 50 years

for urinary tract infections. One pre-clinical study had shown off-the-chart amoebicidal activity

that nobody had ever known about. You might not think that a UTI drug could treat a brain-eating

amoeba, but biochemistry can surprise you.

A couple of years later, I got a call from a mother of a young girl who had been infected

with Balamuthia and was not expected to survive. And she was desperately trying to get a hold

of nitroxylene. I was able to help get what's called an emergency I&D, an investigational new drug

application, because the drug is not approved in the U.S., but it's approved in Europe. You have to

get special permission from the FDA to use the drug. They sent the drug, and Elena had a pretty

remarkable recovery. Now, I mean, it's not a miracle cure. There have been

other patients who have received the treatment who have not survived. But for a disease that had a 90%

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