664. Are Thousands of Medical Cures Hiding in Plain Sight?

There is a horrible infectious disease that you have probably never heard of. It's called balamuthia. 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 is a health science policy analyst in the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA has not approved any treatments for ballamuthia, 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 nitroxaline, which had been approved in Europe for 50 years for urinary tract infections. One preclinical study had shown off the chart amoeba sidal 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.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (52 minutes, 9,309 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.