Towards legionnaires’ disease control: epidemiological or environmental surveillance?
- Agéncia de Salut Pública de Barcelona (formerly Institut Municipal de Salut Pública, Barcelona) and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
- Correspondence to: Dr A Plaséncia, Agéncia de Salut Pública de Barcelona, Lesseps 1, 08023 Barcelona, Spain; aplasenc{at}imsb.bcn.es
Public health efforts need to focus on environmental risk management practices
The recent advances in the rapid diagnosis of legionnaire’s disease and its increasing use by healthcare professionals,1 together with the development of new methods of molecular typing of Legionella pneumophila strains,2 are bringing about a whole new picture on the epidemiology of this disease. This not only includes a greater and quicker possibility of detecting outbreaks, but also enables a more specific approach to the investigation of the emission sources under suspicion. The fact that an increasing number of outbreaks are reported yearly,3,4 and that they seem to yield a growing number of cases, is probably related to this new situation. Moreover, many of the causal relations regarding the sources of some of the earlier investigated outbreaks might not prove to hold any more on the grounds of the new molecular typing methods.
Che and colleagues report in this issue of the journal5 an ecological association at …
