The disease is spread through inhalation contact with contaminated water sources.
One person who got sick was a delivery man. Three others were picking up medication at the hospital pharmacy. Three were outpatients. And one man was waiting to pick up his wife.
“He really enjoyed sitting next to the water wall,” said Thomas Haupt, a Wisconsin health division epidemiologist and lead author of the study. “These water walls are indeed very beautiful, but they’re very risky.”
All eight either had underlying medical conditions or other factors that increased their risks of getting Legionnaires’ disease. Three were hospitalized in intensive care and were on mechanical ventilators; all eight survived.
The study, published online in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, is the second documented outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in a health-care setting associated with a wall-type water fountain, a design that is increasingly popular in hospitals, hotels, spas and other public settings, the study said. In 2007, two cancer patients at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda were diagnosed with the disease after being exposed to a contaminated wall-type water fountain.
Decorative water fountains and water walls can be soothing and calming, so many hospitals and clinics included those amenities as a way to be more patient-friendly, said Jan Patterson, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
But the problem is, even with regular cleaning and testing, “it’s possible for legionella to accumulate,” said Patterson, who is also president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. “I guess the takeaway here is that if you have any underlying conditions, you should avoid walking by them or stay as far away as possible.”
As for hospitals and other health-care facilities, “they should avoid having these in their facilities altogether,” she said.
When the fountain was first suspected as the source of the Wisconsin outbreak, the hospital shut down the water wall and turned it into a planter. No known additional cases of Legionnaires’ disease occurred after that. Many other health-care facilities in Wisconsin shut down or removed their decorative fountains, the study said.
Every year, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention receive reports of about 3,000 people diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease. But experts say that many more cases go unrecognized and between 8,000 to 18,000 wind up in the hospital, according to Lauri Hicks, a CDC medical epidemiologist and specialist on Legionnaires’. More than 10 percent of cases are fatal.
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