Two Legionnaires' disease cases associated with industrial waste water treatment plants: a case report

BMC Infectious Diseases

Case Report

Liisa-Kaarina Neuvonen¹  Kari-Pekka Martimo²  Jaana Kusnetsov³  Silja Mentula⁴  Nhu Nguyen Tran Minh⁵  Søren A Uldum⁶  Timo Korpio⁷  Tuula Putus⁸ 

[1] Medivire Occupational Health Care Center, Finland;Mehiläinen Occupational Health Care, Helsinki, Finland;National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), Water and Health Unit, P.O.Box 95, FI-70701, Kuopio, Finland;National Institute for Health and Welfare, Bacteriology Unit, Helsinki, Finland;National Institute for Health and Welfare, Epidemiologic Surveillance and Response Unit, Helsinki, Finland;Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark;UPM-Kymmene Oyj, Finland;University of Turku, Turku, Finland;

关键词: Waste Water;    Water Treatment Plant;    Roxithromycin;    Cool Tower;    Waste Water Treatment Plant;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2334-10-343

 received in 2010-09-29, accepted in 2010-12-02,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundFinnish and Swedish waste water systems used by the forest industry were found to be exceptionally heavily contaminated with legionellae in 2005.Case presentationWe report two cases of severe pneumonia in employees working at two separate mills in Finland in 2006. Legionella serological and urinary antigen tests were used to diagnose Legionnaires' disease in the symptomatic employees, who had worked at, or close to, waste water treatment plants. Since the findings indicated a Legionella infection, the waste water and home water systems were studied in more detail. The antibody response and Legionella urinary antigen finding of Case A indicated that the infection had been caused by Legionella pneumophila serogroup 1. Case A had been exposed to legionellae while installing a pump into a post-clarification basin at the waste water treatment plant of mill A. Both the water and sludge in the basin contained high concentrations of Legionella pneumophila serogroup 1, in addition to serogroups 3 and 13. Case B was working 200 meters downwind from a waste water treatment plant, which had an active sludge basin and cooling towers. The antibody response indicated that his disease was due to Legionella pneumophila serogroup 2. The cooling tower was the only site at the waste water treatment plant yielding that serogroup, though water in the active sludge basin yielded abundant growth of Legionella pneumophila serogroup 5 and Legionella rubrilucens. Both workers recovered from the disease.ConclusionThese are the first reported cases of Legionnaires' disease in Finland associated with industrial waste water systems.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Kusnetsov et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.