Hospital Legionella News - LD death in Calgary

Grady Semmens
Friday, December 26, 2003

CALGARY -- Health-care officials here will meet Monday to consider testing all city hospitals for the potentially deadly legionella bacteria.

They will also consider specially treating hospital water supplies to prevent future outbreaks of the water-borne disease after the bacteria was discovered in Rockyview Hospital earlier this week.

"We are looking into various methods of increasing disease control, from doing more flushing of our hot-water systems to treating our own water," said Dr. Tom Louie, director of the Calgary Health Region's infection prevention and control department.

"Obviously the question is: If it has been found at Rocky-view, is it at other sites? We'd like to think it is an isolated case but it seems more likely that it came from our water supply rather than from a patient bringing it in and infecting the taps."

Louie said health region officials plan to meet Monday to decide if the water systems in the rest of the city's hospitals should be checked for the bacteria that causes a rare pneumonia-like illness after its presence in the plumbing of Rockyview's intensive-care unit was confirmed last week.

The bacteria was also found in an elderly patient who showed signs of legionnaires' disease after she was admitted to the unit in early December and subsequently passed away from heart disease.

While there's no reason to believe the bacteria that is naturally found in minute amounts in soil and water has grown to hazardous levels outside of the Rockyview ICU, Louie said he is awaiting test results to determine the extent of the contamination.

"It will be another four to seven days before the lab can confidently say yes or no about whether we have any more organisms after we heat-flushed the system," Louie said Wednesday.

"So far there's no proof the water tanks have been infected and colonised, but I have to think about the worst of the worst, so we're also looking at testing in other sites around the city as a precaution."

The first legionella infection of a Calgary hospital has prompted reviews of both the City of Calgary's overall water supply as well as the quality of hospital water systems to determine where the bug may have originated and how such an infection can be kept from happening again.

Calgary Waterworks acting director Paul Fesko said there's no indication the spread of the bacteria is related to the city's water-treatment process.

"As soon as we heard about the disease we reviewed everything to make sure our plants were functioning normally and we're confident the water that we delivered to the hospital wasn't the source," Fesko said. "This bacteria needs a hot, wet environment to cultivate and grow, which means it happens in internal boilers and plumbing systems."

Patients in Rockyview's ICU and cardiac-care units have been put on bottled water until the results of the tests, done after the hospital superheated its water tanks to 83 C to kill any bacteria that may be present, are known.

Hospital critics say the legionella infection is another sign of the declining quality of Alberta's hospitals due to budget cuts in the 1990s.