75
hospitalized with a final diagnosis of Legionellosis.
This disease is rarely reported in our country and the notification is
not obligatory, despite of having more than 2,000,000 of hospitalization
with pneumonia diagnosis per year and knowing that in only 20% of the
cases the causative agent is proven, we have no information on how many
of this total could be Legionellosis.
Our investigationwas focused on the hotel where the tourist was, which
luckily was a small one with only eight employees in the establishment. We
collected water sample from the room where the tourist stayed, from the
water tanks and from the solar heating system. The search for
Legionella
in the collected samples was negative despite of suspect points in the
hydraulic conditions of the facilities. As we were not satisfied with the
results and wanted a better clarification on the eventual contamination of
the referred tourist in that environment, and benefitting from the small
number of workers, we decided to ask for the
Legionella
serology in the local
population. We faced some technical difficulties for the execution of the test,
because the material went to three different laboratories without conditions
to perform the test. The test was then conducted in a Spanish laboratory
revealing that 50% of the workers presented positive serology results for
Legionella
and that they were the exact ones having contact with water: two
from the building maintenance, a serving maid and a housekeeping maid.
The employees working at the reception and in the administrative area
were not exposed to the agent. The statistics in international publications
have always reported an incidence of 5 to 10% of positive serology in the
population in general.
This finding drew the attention to the possibility of having employees
that may come to present pneumonia caused by
Legionella
Pneumophila
,
