Free Republic

A new study of domestic and hospital drinking water systems found Legionella in 41% of samples—with Flinders University researchers making a key connection between the pathogen's co-existence with a "host" microorganism in all samples tested. The study found Legionella bacteria "infect the amoeba host and then once inside these hosts are protected from disinfection strategies," says Harriet Whiley. Researchers tested for Legionella and its likely amoebae hosts in 140 samples of water or biofilm (the slime found on showerheads and end of faucets) to understand how the potentially dangerous bacterium colonizes and proliferates in both domestic and hospital plumbing and...

Five more cases of Legionnaires' disease have been added to the Bronx outbreak that has claimed seven lives and sickened more than six dozen people in the last three weeks, Mayor de Blasio said Tuesday. The number of those killed stands at seven. The mayor's briefing comes a day after the city announced an increase in the death toll and the number of cases at a packed town hall meeting at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, where hundreds of residents gathered to hear what state, city and local officials had to say about the deadly outbreak. Eighty-six cases of...

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is replacing its new high-tech, electric-eye faucets with the old-fashioned kind after discovering that the new hands-free designs actually allowed more contamination from Legionella and other bacteria than the old style. Although the high-tech faucets cut daily water consumption by well over half, Johns Hopkins researchers identified Legionella growing in 50 percent of cultured water samples from 20 electronic-eye faucets in or near patient rooms on three different inpatient units, but in only 15 percent of water cultures from. . . . ."