13 cases of Legionnaire’s Disease have been confirmed in Lake County. Three, are potentially tied to businesses along a small stretch of road in Eastlake.
The business have been given the all clear, but according to the Lake County Health Commissioner, there’s a potential the disease may have traveled.
‘We live so close I think we should know what’s going on around us,” said Tiffany Leonard.
Leonard lives right around the corner from three Eastlake businesses, the Lake County Health Commissioner says, had employees diagnosed several weeks ago, with Legionnaire’s Disease.
“They even ride their bikes past there to go to the park, we’re all over the place over there,” said Leonard.
Her 11 year old son has flu-like symptoms, the first sign of a legionnaire’s infection. She’s angry she wasn’t made aware of a potential threat, sooner.
“I have three kids, so for their safety I would’ve liked to have at least had them checked out cause I don’t want to just wake up one day and they’re so sick and they pass away like that one guy did,” she said.
‘We normally don’t expose this information because it’s unfair to the patients at risk and the individuals infected by the disease, so until it reaches a large threshold number, we try to keep that as quietly as possible,” said Lake County Health Commissioner, Ron Graham.
The Health Commissioner tells us those that needed to know did. The employees of the companies where people fell ill, were made aware and the cleanup process began immediately.
But with 13 cases, one dead, county officials want everyone to know, there’s still a slight threat.
‘If you feel like you have flu like or pneumonia symptoms and you do live in the area, the best is to let your physician know, your medical care provider know that they can do a urinalysis test to identify that,” said Graham.
12 additional Lake County companies are being investigated by county health officials to make sure their cooling towers do not contain legionnaire’s bacteria.
