2019 Amoeba Summit in Orlando
My interviews with some of the speakers and experts
In 2014, Steve and Shelly Smelski lost their 11-year-old son, Jordan, to an infection caused by a brain-eating amoeba after the family swam in a hot spring in while on vacation in Costa Rica.
This family tragedy prompted the start of the advocacy organization, The Jordan Smelski Foundation for Amoeba Awareness, with a mission to create global awareness about the risks associated with amoebas in fresh warm water and to educate families and medical communities about the risks from Naegleria fowleri and Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM).
For a number of years, the Smelski’s would hold an annual amoeba summit where experts would present on different topics of the lethal parasitic disease.
In 2019, the year of the 4th summit, Steve contacted me about giving me a space at the summit to interview some of the experts on hand. The interviews ranged from physicians who treated PAM patients, to laboratorians who diagnosed the parasite to researchers on the cutting edge of topics like drug development to global epidemiology.
Here are some of the interviews:
Juan Dumois, MD, Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist at All Children's Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine in St. Petersburg
Kevin Sherin, MD, Medical Director of Clinica Mi Salud and clinical professor at the UCF and FSU College of Medicine
Vincent Valente, MD, Asst. Medical Director for Emergency Medicine for AdventHealth, Altamonte Springs
Dennis Kyle, PhD, Director, Center for Tropical & Emerging Global Diseases at the University of Georgia
Shiela Black, MHM, BSMT(ASCP), Medical Technologist at AdventHealth in Orlando
Humberto Liriano, MD, a physician directly involved in the successful treatment of 16-year-old Sebastian DeLeon in 2016
Jennifer Cope, MD, Medical Epidemiologist with the CDC