Legionnaires Disease

Maryland General Hospital has shut off its hot water after routine tests showed low levels of Legionella bacteria in the water system. The bacteria, which can cause Legionnaires' disease, were detected Tuesday night during quarterly testing of water quality, said Monica Smith, a hospital spokeswoman. None of the 230-bed hospital's operations has been shut down or curtailed as a result of the problem, she said. Patients are being admitted, and no patients or staff members have shown signs of the disease, she said.

Havre de Grace rests like a jewel on the shores of the Susquehanna River, a town of 12,000 where antiques shops and an ice cream parlor share space with restaurants. It is not unusual to spot a neighbor biking down to the marina to walk the wooden promenade or feed the ducks.At the heart of the town is Harford Memorial Hospital, an 85-year-old institution in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood."It's a community hospital," Havre de Grace City Manager Mary Ann Lisanti said of the hospital, the town's largest employer and one of the largest in Harford County.

A fourth person died yesterday of Legionnaires' disease at Harford Memorial Hospital where a hot water tank is believed to have been the source of a recent outbreak.Noting state confidentiality laws, officials declined to identify the patient. But a spokeswoman for a Havre de Grace nursing home last week confirmed that the patient was a woman in her 80s who became ill at the nursing home and was sent to the hospital.While giving no other details, Bob Netherland, a spokesman for Upper Chesapeake Health Systems Inc., which runs the Havre de Grace hospital, said the patient was admitted there on June 28 with pneumonia and Legionnaires' disease symptoms.

A third person has died in an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease at Harford Memorial Hospital, raising to five the number of patients confirmed to have been infected with the bacteria, hospital officials said yesterday.An elderly man who had been treated at the Havre de Grace facility last month was readmitted Friday with pneumonia-like symptoms and died there that evening, hospital officials acknowledged. On Saturday, test results showed that the man -- who was in the hospital from June 18 to June 28 for an unrelated illness -- had contracted the disease, they said.

Even as Harford Memorial Hospital officials said they acted properly in handling four cases of Legionnaires' disease, family members of a woman who died of the disease complained yesterday that the hospital delayed telling them about the infection.Evelyn Blakely, daughter of Elizabeth M. Cox, 79, said the family was not notified when Cox was diagnosed with Legionnaires' disease July 2. They were not told that she had the disease until Thursday -- two days after she died from the disease, Blakely said.

The Baltimore County health director warned county and state employees at a Towson office building yesterday to watch for symptoms of Legionnaires' disease after a Health Department staffer contracted the disease.In a memo from Dr. Michelle A. Leverett, about 700 county and state employees were notified that Legionnaires' disease, which could be spread through a building's water and ventilation systems, has been diagnosed in a worker in the Investment Building.An environmental consultant will test the drinking water and the ventilation system in the 13-story building off York Road, said an attorney for the building's owner, A.M.G.

State health officials focused yesterday on the water system at Harford Memorial Hospital as the likely source of the Legionnaires' disease infection that has struck four people there since June 8, leaving two dead.Officials were still awaiting results of water samples taken last week to determine if the hospital is the source of the Legionella bacteria, but have ruled out other connections among the four people who were infected."We had to determine what other possible common factors they shared," said Tori Leonard, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease was found in the water systems of a Towson office building where hundreds of state and county employees work, but the organism is probably no longer there, building managers and Baltimore County health officials said yesterday.Testers from Clayton Environmental Consultants of Novi, Mich., took water samples in the 13-story Investment Building, off York Road in central Towson. The building's water systems were disinfected earlier this month, after an unidentified woman who works there was diagnosed with the disease.

The U.S. Naval Academy removed professors and students from an academic building yesterday after discovering higher-than-usual levels of Legionella bacteria, the germ that can cause Legionnaires' disease.A Baltimore-based company that regularly inspects and tests the academy's water systems found the bacteria Tuesday afternoon in Rickover Hall, home of the school's engineering department. The bacteria were found in the water circulating through the building's cooling system. Academy officials said they did not think any of the bacteria had escaped into the air, nor was there any risk of contamination to drinking water, but air and water samples were taken to make sure.

State and Harford County health officials are investigating four cases of Legionnaires' disease at Harford Memorial Hospital, including two deaths -- the most recent of them Tuesday.As a precaution, the hospital over the weekend flushed its water system, a potential source of contamination. State health officials are trying to determine if the hospital is the source of the Legionella bacterium."We suspect that it might be in the hospital, but we will not be absolutely sure until we've tested water samples we've taken from their water system," said Tori Leonard, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

City and state health officials reassured an anxious, standing-room-only crowd of elderly residents of Stadium Place on Friday that the Legionnaires' disease that killed one of their number and sickened four others cannot be spread from person to person. Residents of the senior housing community on the former site of Memorial Stadium peppered officials with dozens of questions - many focused on how they could protect themselves from contracting the sometimes-fatal form of pneumonia and whether authorities had responded quickly enough to the outbreak.

City and state officials are scrambling for clues to what caused an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease at a senior living facility on the former site of Memorial Stadium, leaving one person dead and four others sickened. Officials at the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Baltimore Health Department were interviewing those who have fallen ill and planning to test water sources to try to determine the origin of the outbreak at Stadium Place, a retirement community built 10 years ago. Authorities also were informing residents about symptoms so any new cases can be caught early.

The building where Johns Hopkins Hospital cares for its transplant patients is on water restrictions this week after routine tests of the water system on July 2 turned up evidence of the bacterium that causes Legionnaires' disease. A hospital spokesman said no patients or employees have been infected by the organism, which can cause a lung infection fatal in 5 percent to 30 percent of cases. "No one is sick. Nor has anyone at the hospital been identified, either patient or staff, as having picked up a Legionella infection," said Hopkins spokesman David March.

Tests at a downtown state office building where an employee came down with Legionnaires' disease were negative for the bacteria that causes the illness, officials said yesterday. When workers arrived at the William Donald Schaefer Tower on St. Paul Street yesterday morning, they were handed a memo informing them of the lab test results, according to Dave Humphrey, a spokesman for the Department of General Services, which operates the facility. A routine annual test done on the air-conditioning system's cooling tower showed no signs of live Legionella bacteria, he said.

An employee of the William Donald Schaefer Tower downtown was stricken with Legionnaires' disease, and several others with respiratory illnesses are being examined, but state officials were cautioning yesterday that they don't believe the building is contaminated. "Right now, what we have is one case," Gov. Martin O'Malley told reporters yesterday at a news conference inside the building. "If there were a second case in this building, that would tell us we have to go into a much deeper level of forensic examination."

Maryland General Hospital has shut off its hot water after routine tests showed low levels of Legionella bacteria in the water system. The bacteria, which can cause Legionnaires' disease, were detected Tuesday night during quarterly testing of water quality, said Monica Smith, a hospital spokeswoman. None of the 230-bed hospital's operations has been shut down or curtailed as a result of the problem, she said. Patients are being admitted, and no patients or staff members have shown signs of the disease, she said.

Stan Williams was hospitalized in 2000 at Harford Memorial Hospital with Legionnaires' disease -- a bacterial pneumonia caused by an infection from a contaminated air conditioner, cooling towers or stagnant water supplies -- and spent 20 days in a coma. His family was told repeatedly that he wasn't going to wake up. When he did, the hospital staff thought it was a miracle. He attributes his recovery to the care he received at the hospital. Although he recovered from the coma, the illness left him unable to feel his feet at times, rendering him permanently disabled and unable to return to work as a firefighter.

The discovery of the bacteria that cause Legionnaires' disease in a Hagerstown prison's water supply has prompted Maryland officials to restrict showers in one housing unit and to limit inmates and staff assigned there to drinking bottled water, prison officials said yesterday. Prison and health officials ordered tests of the water at Roxbury Correctional Institution after a former inmate was diagnosed with Legionnaires' disease a few days after his release last month, said George Gregory, a spokesman for the state prison system.

METAIRIE, La. -- The question quietly circulating here is whether Legionnaires' disease is spreading in the battered refuse left by Hurricane Katrina. Some New Orleans-area doctors are saying the bacterium that can lead to the disease, a severe and stubborn form of pneumonia, might be growing in the soggy remains of buildings flooded after the hurricane. But some experts question whether the bacterium can grow in that environment, and state officials insist that there is no public health threat.

The Howard County school system plans to conduct buildingwide tests at Faulkner Ridge Center to assess potential health risks after one confirmed case of Legionnaires' disease in the fall and on-and-off concerns about respiratory problems from staff members there, school officials said yesterday. "Even though the Health Department has said it doesn't meet their criteria for testing, we're going to go ahead and conduct tests to make sure there are not any building-related health risks," said Patti Caplan, the school system's spokeswoman.