Pneumonia caused by the legionella bacterium killed a fifth victim this Sunday in Tucumán, in northwestern Argentina, the province’s Ministry of Health announced.
“He is a 64-year-old man, with comorbidities, who was in serious condition in a public hospital,” the ministry said in a statement.
A total of 11 people presented similar symptoms and six remain under treatment, three of whom remain hospitalized, according to the province’s Minister of Health, Luis Medina Cruz.
The agent that caused the outbreak of bilateral pneumonia “is legionella,” the Argentine Minister of Health, Carla Vizzotti, had declared the day before at a press conference in Tucumán, adding that the exact type of legionella was being identified.
Eleven cases have been identified in total, centered on a private clinic in San Miguel de Tucumán, capital of the province of Tucumán.
A serious lung infection
On Saturday morning, provincial health authorities announced a fourth death since Monday, a 48-year-old man who also had comorbidities.
Before him, two members of the nursing staff of the private clinic had died, then a 70-year-old woman, a patient of this same clinic where she had undergone surgery.
Initial tests had ruled out Covid-19, influenza, influenza type A and B, and hantaviruses (transmitted by rodents) as the cause of these pneumonias.
The samples had been sent to the Malbran Institute in Buenos Aires, a national benchmark in the field of infectious diseases, of which the minister delivered the first results.
Legionnaires’ disease is a serious lung infection of bacterial origin, whose contamination can be carried out through the respiratory tract by inhaling the bacteria, “through water or air conditioning,” recalled Minister Carla Vizzotti.
The president of the Medical Association of the province of Tucumán, Héctor Sale, had highlighted this week that the pathology observed in Tucumán was “aggressive”, but that it was not a priori a disease transmitted from person to person, “because of the fact that close contacts of these patients do not show any symptoms.
Source: BFM TV
