This is what it's like to treat a 'brain-eating' amoeba infection

In August 2013, an 8-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital in San Antonio, Texas after contracting a so-called brain-eating amoeba infection. His case was unusual because he ultimately survived: Brain-eating amoeba infections are nearly always fatal.

The boy's infection was caused by Naegleria fowleri, a single-celled organism that lives in warm freshwater lakes, rivers and hot springs. The protozoan enters the body when water goes up the nose and into the brain, causing a disease called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. 

Dennis Conrad, a now-retired professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, was one of the doctors who treated the boy in 2013. Live Science spoke with Conrad about what it was like fighting the disease and what lessons can be drawn from the experience.

Related: Deadly amoeba brain infection can result from unsafe nasal rinsing, CDC warns

Emily Cooke: So, taking it back to 2013, what happened to this boy?

Dennis Conrad: This boy had been with his mother for the summer, who lives in Mexico. 

Many of those "colonias" that exist on the border do not have potable water: They have no sewerage system, nor pipe water. So, they [people] buy their drinking water from large trucks, but otherwise, the water that they need, not for drinking necessarily, but for laundering and bathing and that, are from a natural source.