Nursing homes have legionella near miss

Today the Health and Safety Executive have issued a new warning about the dangers of legionnaires disease.

They reiterate that water systems must be fully checked using a detailed and accurate risk assessment to fully check the appropriate temperatures and moisture levels of water systems and air conditioning. This advice follows the recent conviction of a water treatment company in Wokingham, who had been found to be carrying out unsuitable and inaccurate risk assessments on a number of nursing homes in Wales.

They marked the nursing homes as a 'low risk' leading to a lack of controls on the new homes and increasing the occupants risk to legionnaires disease. The elderly and infirm residents of the nursing homes are particularly susceptible due to weaker immune systems, to the bacteria that develops in the water systems which can give rise to the growth of diseases like legionnaires.

The water treatment company was fined £24,000 and luckily no outbreaks of the legionnaires had been reported, but the court heard that the nursing homes had been 'badly let down.'

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August 14^th 2009

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