ELMIRA - Six residents at a housing complex for seniors have been stricken with Legionnaires' disease and one has died, New York health officials said Friday.
Anna Marie Tongate, 75, who moved in March from the nearby hamlet of Big Flats to the apartment complex in Elmira, died at a hospital Thursday about a week after falling ill, her family said.
Five other people at the complex in this city of 29,000 in western New York have been infected, the state Health Department said, but declined to provide further details.
Tongate, a mother of three, lived alone at the complex. Her family, which has hired a lawyer to investigate, said several residents began displaying flulike symptoms last week, but Tongate wasn't brought to the hospital until Sunday when relatives recognized she was seriously ill.
“The public deserves to know why this happened,” Tongate's daughter, Kathy Lazeski, said in a statement. “Our hearts go out to all the other families in Elmira suffering through this horrible ordeal.”
Dozens of samples have been collected to determine where the contamination began but it could be a week or more before lab results are known, said Robert Page, Chemung County's public health director.
One person died and 12 others fell ill this summer in a Legionnaires' outbreak at a Syracuse hospital and a nearby nursing home. In Rochester, a hospital patient was recently diagnosed with the disease but it remains unknown if the infection happened at the hospital or beforehand.
Excluding New York City, 163 preliminary cases of Legionnaires' disease have been reported in New York state this year compared with 234 cases in 2007, health officials in Albany said.
Legionnaires' is a severe form of pneumonia that can be fatal if left untreated. Symptoms include high fever, chills and cough.
People become infected by inhaling airborne water droplets that contain a bacterium most often found in sources of standing water, such as air conditioning ducts, storage tanks and rivers.
The disease takes its name from an outbreak during an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in July 1976 where 34 people died.
AP-ES-08-15-08 1453EDT
Five other people at the complex in this city of 29,000 in western New York have been infected, the state Health Department said, but declined to provide further details.
Tongate, a mother of three, lived alone at the complex. Her family, which has hired a lawyer to investigate, said several residents began displaying flulike symptoms last week, but Tongate wasn't brought to the hospital until Sunday when relatives recognized she was seriously ill.
“The public deserves to know why this happened,” Tongate's daughter, Kathy Lazeski, said in a statement. “Our hearts go out to all the other families in Elmira suffering through this horrible ordeal.”
Dozens of samples have been collected to determine where the contamination began but it could be a week or more before lab results are known, said Robert Page, Chemung County's public health director.
One person died and 12 others fell ill this summer in a Legionnaires' outbreak at a Syracuse hospital and a nearby nursing home. In Rochester, a hospital patient was recently diagnosed with the disease but it remains unknown if the infection happened at the hospital or beforehand.
Excluding New York City, 163 preliminary cases of Legionnaires' disease have been reported in New York state this year compared with 234 cases in 2007, health officials in Albany said.
Legionnaires' is a severe form of pneumonia that can be fatal if left untreated. Symptoms include high fever, chills and cough.
People become infected by inhaling airborne water droplets that contain a bacterium most often found in sources of standing water, such as air conditioning ducts, storage tanks and rivers.
The disease takes its name from an outbreak during an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in July 1976 where 34 people died.
AP-ES-08-15-08 1453EDT
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