Legionnaires’ disease: a deadly danger in hospitals
It’s the ultimate irony. You or one of your loved ones are admitted to a hospital or care facility to recover from something… and you end up getting sicker than if you’d never gone in the first place.
According to the results of a groundbreaking CDC analysis, that’s happening in medical facilities all over the U.S. — but not for the reasons you might think.
The culprit isn’t the usual type of hospital-acquired infection we hear about all the time. Instead, it’s something you may not have realized is still very much a menace — the dreaded form of pneumonia known as Legionnaires’ disease.
And if you suffer from any kind of respiratory problems, smoke or are over 50, you can be especially susceptible to the disease.
The worst part is, none of those illnesses and deaths would likely have occurred if those institutions had simply followed certain basic precautions.
No one had ever heard of Legionnaires’ disease prior to the summer of 1976. That was the year when about 4,000 members of the Pennsylvania State American Legion gathered at the luxurious Bellevue-Stratford hotel in Philadelphia for the group’s 58th annual convention.
When pneumonia-like symptoms suddenly afflicted several hundred of them — 34 of whom ultimately died — the media picked up the story, and suddenly everyone knew about Legionnaires’ disease.
A decade later, researchers identified its cause as a bacterium that can be spread through aerosolized water droplets, which they called Legionella pneumophila. In the Bellevue-Stratford case, the microbes were incubated in and spread by the hotel’s air-conditioning system.
But simply tracing the source hasn’t — by any means — led to the eradication of Legionnaires’ disease, which still sickens thousands every year and will kill one out of 10 victims.
And now, as the CDC has recently learned, some of the more common places where people come down with the disease are health-care facilities — where Legionnaires’ kills one out of four people afflicted.
Unbelievably, this is the first time the CDC has bothered to check state data on how many are contracting Legionnaires’ this way. Of the 20 states and one metro area analyzed, close to 80 percent had reports of patients who picked up the disease while being treated for some other problem.
While hospital-acquired infections are all too commonplace these days, what’s different about Legionnaires’ is that it’s not generally considered contagious. Instead, it’s the result of sloppy maintenance in servicing a building’s water system.
As the CDC noted, all it takes is an “effective water management program” to keep Legionella at bay.
And although the solution sounds simple enough, there’s really not much you can do if you’re in a hospital or rehab center to find out how meticulous — or not — they’ve been with their air-conditioning or water systems!
What you can do, however, is be aware of the symptoms of Legionnaires’, which can include:
- fever that can climb as high as 104 degrees,
- chills, cough and a headache,
- coughing up mucus or blood, along with chest pain and shortness of breath.
Other symptoms can be diarrhea, nausea and confusion. And while the usual “incubation” time after being exposed to the bacteria is a week or so, you can still come down with Legionnaires’ up to two weeks later.
It’s obvious that these symptoms look a lot like many other conditions, so if you or a loved one are experiencing any of them, you should insist that a specific test for this disease be done ASAP. While a chest x-ray is typically used to check for pneumonia, ruling out Legionnaires’ will require a special urine or mucus test.
Proper and prompt antibiotic treatment can save lives and keep the disease from spiraling into septic shock or kidney and respiratory failure, which is why it’s especially important to get the right kind of testing done.
The Legionella bacteria should be a sad memory at this point. But the unfortunate truth is that, besides hospitals and care facilities, this bacteria can be harbored in any large air-conditioning units in office buildings, hotels, apartments and gyms. And it easily grows in smaller places, too, like hot tubs, spas, saunas, and even showers — anywhere you might inhale water mist.
That’s why it’s especially important that you remain vigilant — and don’t let a doctor rule out Legionnaires’ disease unless he has your test results and knows absolutely, positively that you don’t have it.
“CDC director: Too many Legionnaires’ cases start in health care settings” Dr. Anne Schuchat, June 6, 2017, CNN, cnn.com
