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(Image: Team Koral Reef FB)

A young newlywed's life was tragically cut short after she contracted a rare, brain-eating amoeba on holiday.

Koral Reef, 20, of Temecula Valley, California, had just married her high school sweetheart Corey Pier when she fell ill. Now he is a widower before even attending university.

Koral is believed to have caught a deadly amoeba called Balamuthia while swimming on holiday in Arizona's Lake Havasu in May 2013.

Her wedding was in July and not long after that her symptoms started.

"They told us there is no real treatment for this," said Mr Pier.

(Image: Team Koral Reef FB)

"I broke down and I was freaking out. I didn’t want to tell her. She wouldn’t remember anyway. She was there, but she wasn’t there. It was just eating away at her brain, he told the Press Examiner.

Her mother, Cybil Meister, described her heartbreaking decline.

"She started with the headaches, the stiff neck, the sensitivity to light and heat was bad," Meister told NBC 7.

(Image: Team Koral Reef FB)

"They said, ‘Oh, she’s having withdrawal from her birth control. It’s a migraine.’ They gave her medicine and sent her home and then she progressively got worse."

In September Koral was struggling to see.

Ms Mesiter said: "She went to Temecula Valley (a hospital) and they did an MRI. They showed us the MRI and the amoeba, which they didn't know was an amoeba, but there was a mass covering the entire right side of her brain and partial of her left."

The following month she was dead.

The condition kills the vast majority of people infected with it - and there is no known effective treatment.

(Image: Team Koral Reef FB)

Balamuthia is inhaled and the parasite often lives in soil and dust. The symptoms of the infection - headache, fatigue, and a stiff neck – are common and so it is hard to diagnose.

Now Koral's mother is trying to raise awareness of the condition which so cruelly robbed her of her daughter.

"We're reaching out to people trying to raise awareness because I don't think people understand how serious it can be. It's deadly," she added.

Aaron Evans, 14, died from an infection caused by another parasite, Naegleria fowleri, that his family believe he contracted at the same lake.