To the 845 signers over the past weekend, thank you so much! Please please keep sharing. Amoebic meningoencephalitis is not just a headline, it does not just affect an occasional "rare" victim. This affects mothers, fathers, children of victims, entire families, as well as communities. We've been through this, and we believe that one more child, one more family, is one too many. This is a highly lethal, essentially untreatable infection that affects children, teens, and young adults, mothers and fathers, in the prime of life. Scientists know very little about these free living amoebae. No one can tell you who is more at risk or who will be the next victim. Doctors don't know enough to look for it in patients. Treatment involves multiple intravenous and intraspinal drugs, most of which do not work or are given after the critical first 12 hours, as well as whole body cooling and induced coma. Despite this, it remains 99% lethal. And yet it's so easy to prevent, by making families aware to keep untreated or low-chlorine water *out* of the nose. Why aren't more parents and doctors made aware? Addition to the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System means knowledge, it means mandatory attention from all state health departments and education of clinicians, it means interest in and funding of research. It means that the voices of the frontline healthcare professionals who care for patients and not "rates" have been heard. It means that the voices of those who care about children, who have no vote and no voice but those who speak for them--*your* voices--have been heard. Amoebic meningitis is rare, but survival is rarer, and our kids were rarer still. We all thank you! Sandra G. Gompf, MD, FACP, FIDSA Infectious Diseases Subspecialist and forever Philip's Mom