Victoria records first death in Legionnaires’ outbreak

An elderly woman who contracted Legionnaires’ disease has died as Victorian authorities work to determine the source of the outbreak.

Transcript

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.