During a press conference today at Florida Hospital for Children in Orlando, we learned that 16-year-old Sebastian DeLeon survived the lethal amoeba responsible for a case fatality rate of 97 percent.

Sebastian DeLeon contracted the Naegleria fowleri infection after swimming on private property in Broward County, Florida Department of Health officials believe.

On Aug. 5, the teen began developing meningitis-like symptoms and an intense headache during a family vacation in Orlando, said Dr. Humberto Liriano, a pediatric intensivist at Florida Hospital for Children.

Doctors worked to stabilize DeLeon and induced him into a coma for three days until it was deemed safe to wake him up. And within hours, he spoke", Humberto said during a August 23 press conference."Since then, he's done tremendously well.

"We are very optimistic", he said. He's walking, he's speaking. I saw him already this morning.

And though Sebastian remains in his ward, preparing to go home, his parents appeared at the news conference to describe their joy and their fears of losing their "energetic, adventurous" son.

Naegleria fowleri, a single-cell amoeba, can be found in brackish bodies of water such as freshwater lakes, ponds and rivers.

It was his 11-year-old son, Jordan Smelski, that had died at Florida Hospital for Children two years ago from the same brain-eating amoeba that attacked Sebastian. The cases are so rare that only four people have survived in the past 50 years. "We were fortunate to be so close", said Sebastian's mother Brunilda Gonzalez.

"The idea I came up with was rather than just leave it in warehouse lab, let's get the drug out into the community", Profunda CEO Todd Maclaughlan said. The medical team that diagnosed and treated the teen will also speak.

Doctors at Florida Children's Hospital were also able to get quick access to a rare medication now being investigated by the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention called "miltefosine", which has shown some promise in killing the amoeba.

Profounda's pill, Impevido, is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it is not readily available in hospitals. They administered miltesfosine and other antimicrobials and ran tests daily to check for the amoeba in hopes of getting a negative result.

"I went back and studied it for a while", Black told WKMG. The amoeba aren't always necessarily very active, so you literally have to look and watch.

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