An elderly woman who contracted Legionnaires’ disease has died as Victorian authorities work to determine the source of the outbreak.
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00:00Just recently, we have heard from Dr Claire Looker, who is Victoria's Chief Health Officer.
00:06She has said that this lady was among 60 confirmed cases and 10 suspected cases in this Legionnaires'
00:14Disease outbreak. And she's also given information that 59 of those 60 cases have been hospitalised,
00:22many of whom have been also put into intensive care, suffering from severe community-acquired
00:29pneumonia. But this is what she had to say about our first fatality in this case.
00:36Very sadly, one person, a lady in her 90s, has died after contracting Legionnaires' Disease.
00:42This woman became ill on Tuesday evening, presented to hospital and passed away shortly
00:47after and our condolences are with her family.
00:51That's Dr Claire Looker there, the Chief Health Officer of Victoria, and she's also given
00:55us an update on just where the investigation is at. Now, what she has said is that they
01:00are now focusing on an area in Melbourne, which is Derrimut and Laverton North. And
01:07so they are predominantly industrial areas where we have a lot of those cooling towers.
01:12And at the moment, they are using mapping software to be able to cross-check where a
01:16lot of these people who have tested positive have been moving around and then looking at
01:22some of those crossovers as well. So they believe that they have already identified
01:26about 100 towers, which are the most likely causes. So far, they've already gone along
01:32and tested and looked at about 41 of them and also disinfected them. They're also looking
01:38at another 15 towers today. But this is what she had to say about the situation in terms
01:45of those cooling towers.
01:48I think there's a high probability that we have already visited the tower and disinfected
01:52it. And that is really driven by some pretty compelling epidemiology and crossover of where
01:59many of our cases have visited. I'm cautious. I obviously can't say that with certainty
02:05until we have test results back. But yes, confident that it is one of the ones we visited.
02:13So as she says there, there are a lot of cooling towers that they are currently looking at.
02:17And the difficulty is that they obviously take a little bit of time for those test results
02:22to come back, because it really depends on the level of the Legionella bacterium that
02:27might be there that needs to be, first of all, colonised and then come up with enough
02:32of a sample to create a positive test result. So far, they have received no positives at
02:38the moment. But it is a really wide geographical spread as well. And so what they're believing
02:43is that it could be due to Melbourne's very cold weather and what's called a thermal inversion.
02:49So they've actually been working with the Bureau of Meteorology to try to work out why
02:53we've seen such a widespread area, even if some of these cases or the cases that can
02:59actually be pinpointed to this particular Derrimut and Laverton North area. It's obviously
03:04spread through fine water droplets. There was also a question as to whether or not a
03:09recent factory fire in Derrimut might have caused a bit of a problem. She says that at
03:14the moment they believe that it's unlikely that that could have caused any implications
03:19in terms of creating the Legionella bacterium, because there hasn't been any sort of documented
03:24case either here or internationally to suggest that fire could have such an impact.