NEW ORLEANS – Sales of bottled water have gushed while officials try to pin down the source of a deadly amoeba found in the water supply of St. Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans.

Experts say the only danger is to people who get the organism way up their nose. Its only access to the brain is through minute openings in a bone that lies level with the top of the eyeball, said Louisiana’s state epidemiologist, Dr. Raoult Ratard.

But many people are scared. “As far as taking a bath or shower, you got no other choice,” said Debbie Sciortino. “But I ain’t drinking it, I ain’t giving it to the dogs and I ain’t cooking with it, either.”

The state Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) has tried to dispel common “myths and rumors” about the amoeba, Naegleria fowleri — starting with the notion that the parish water isn’t safe to drink. The parish held a public meeting about its water Thursday night.

The worries began Sept. 12, when the state health department reported that water in the Violet and Arabi communities outside New Orleans had tested positive for the amoeba, which killed a 4-year-old Mississippi boy in August after he visited St. Bernard Parish.

Jonathan Yoder, an epidemiologist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s waterborne disease prevention branch, said Naegleria has never before been found in water treated by a U.S. water system.

There have been 132 documented infections from the amoeba since 1962, almost all of them fatal, health officials say.

Both of Louisiana’s 2011 infections were of people who used tap water to flush out their sinuses. However, each of the earlier cases, Yoder said the amoeba was found in the house’s hot water system but not in either municipal water or water coming from the home’s cold water tap.

But still people worry.

“Nobody’s washing their faces in the showers anymore. Nobody’s drinking the water,” Angela Miller of Violet said. “My neighbor has a pool that they have emptied. And they have no water in there now until this matter is cleared up.”

That is not necessary, experts say. Stomach acids, boiling and chlorine all will kill the amoeba.

Many people think water should test free of the amoeba before they use it, DHH said, but testing tap water for the amoeba is not as important as making sure that it holds enough chlorine to kill the microbe. To get the recommended level of chlorine at the system’s outer reaches, the parish has been putting more chlorine into the water.

Investigators said they may never know just how Naegleria got into the pipes.