VIC health department urges people to be on the lookout for symptoms of legionnaires disease
Victoria's health department is urging people who have been in Melbourne to seek urgent medical care if they have symptoms of legionnaires disease, following an outbreak in the city.
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00:00Victoria's Health Department says that there have been 22 confirmed and 6 suspected cases
00:07of Legionnaire's disease diagnosed since last Friday.
00:12And overnight in fact they've had another few suspected cases come in so they expect
00:17that number to rise.
00:18Now that's quite significant when you take into account the fact that for the entire
00:23year last year we saw just 180 cases.
00:27So we heard from Dr Clare Looker who is the Chief Health Officer of Victoria.
00:33She was speaking on 774 Radio Melbourne just a short time ago and she says that this is
00:39a real concern.
00:41Part of our investigation is to do very thorough case interviews either with the patient themselves
00:46or next of kin to try and identify common sites that people have been to.
00:51So like a shopping centre or something?
00:54Or an industrial site that they might have passed through in that incubation period so
00:58the two weeks before they got unwell.
01:00So we're doing that and doing a lot of cross-checking with all the information we have about cooling
01:04towers in Victoria.
01:05That's Dr Clare Looker, the Chief Health Officer of Victoria there.
01:09And she says predominantly these new cases of Legionnaire's disease appear to be in Melbourne's
01:14north and west but they're certainly not discounting anywhere given that all of the patients came
01:20from either Melbourne, lived there or have visited there in recent times.
01:25And we're talking about multiple locations across the metropolitan area.
01:30She says most of the patients are aged over 40, many are in hospital and some have been
01:36placed into intensive care with community acquired severe pneumonia.
01:40And she says this is a particularly nasty form of pneumonia.
01:44And they're asking for operators of cooling towers to make sure that they are up to date
01:50with their testing and servicing regimes as well because we've seen so many of these outbreaks
01:55in the past come from some of those large cooling towers.
01:58They've also come from other man-made sources of water like spas as well.
02:03But this sort of Legionella bacteria can actually exist generally in the environment in areas
02:09like creeks and waterways.
02:12Also man-made areas like misting machines or big industrial humidifiers.
02:17So they're not ruling anything out at this stage as they urgently try to test and cross-check
02:22some of those sites.
02:24Dr Claire Looker also says as well that at this stage they are not looking at potentially
02:31multiple sources that this is likely to come from some single source of contamination.
02:36But people need to be on the lookout while they're still trying to pinpoint this cause.