Acanthamoeba Keratitis Case Study

From Paradise to Parasite
When one envisions taking a trip abroad to Southern France, they might imagine bright blue skies, warm sand beneath their feet, and a relaxing day at the lake with their family. Richard Brogan, a math teacher from the United Kingdom was expecting just that, but what he ended up truly experiencing was nothing short of a nightmare. Blurry vision and slight redness in his eye were no reason to panic, for mild irritation was common for Brogan due to his frequent use of contact lenses. However, when his blurry vision worsened to near blindness and the pain in his eye intensified to pure agony, he decided to cut his vacation short and make an appointment with his ophthalmologist. The diagnosis? Acanthamoeba keratitis. "I

Cristina Margolis, another victim of the Acanthamoeba parasite described this procedure. "They numbed my eye, pried it open with teeth-like jaws and literally scraped away at my eye with a sharp tool," Margolis said. The culturing process is typically slow, taking days to weeks to reach a concrete diagnosis, thereby delaying treatment and worsening the prognosis. However, thanks to a study conducted by researchers at the Eye Clinic of the Department of Surgery and Translational Medicine of Florence Careggi University Hospital in Florence, Italy in 2015, doctors were able to diagnose Margolis in less than three hours. The researchers collected corneal scrapings from thirteen different individuals suspected of having the parasite. Then, they extracted DNA from the corneal samples and used Real Time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to amplify the DNA sequence, which they were able to run through a database, allowing them to entirely bypass having to culture the amoeba. "In only 120 minutes, we were able to detect and confirm the Acanthamoeba infection among all suspected cases," one of the Florence researchers