Research in Medicine

Background: The free-living amoeba called amphizoic amoebae, have the ability to live in natural environmental resources, including water, soil, dust and body tissues of humans and animals. Unlike other free-living amoebae, Neagleria fowleri could cause fatal disease called Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis in immunocompetent humans and animals. The disease affects the meninges membrane of brain and in a short time the affected people will die. Materials and methods: This paper presents an overview of the free-living amoeba pathogens using keywords, N. fowleri, brain-eating amoeba, primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, treatment, prevention and control methods in Google scholar search engines, Medline, PubMed and Relevant books. Finally, 27 articles selected in both Persian and English were fully studied. Conclusions and Recommendations: Due to fulminant progress of the disease caused by N. fowleri and many reports regarding its death worldwide and also reported case of the brain-eating amoeba in Iran and identification of different species of amoebae including N. australiensis and N. gruberi in Tehran water resources and dust hospital in Tehran and the hot springs of Ardabil province awareness regarding N. fowleri distribution in environment, its identification criteria, pathogenesis process and recognizing the symptoms of the disease is essential and necessary. It should be noted that in addition to people with healthy immune system, the amoebae could attack people with impaired immunity. For these purposes, awareness and attention of people at risk is necessary by installing warning signs along the springs and water sources.