New drugs may help patients with life-threatening "brain-eating" amoeba infections. (Image credit: Marilyn Perkins for Live Science)

On a hot Saturday in San Antonio over 10 years ago, an 8-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital after days of fever, headache, vomiting and sensitivity to light. The child's mother, who lived near the Texas-Mexico border, had taken him to a series of clinics in Mexico, but his condition had worsened. The child was now unconscious and unresponsive to sound, light or other stimuli.

Doctors put the child on a ventilator and began a breakneck effort to find out what was wrong. What they discovered, swimming in the boy's cerebrospinal fluid, was an organism that left little room for hope: Naegleria fowleri , more popularly known as a "brain-eating amoeba."

But Conrad had recently read that a new drug option, miltefosine, had been approved as an experimental treatment for N. fowleri infections.…