Legionnaires’ disease New Hampshire: One dead in hospital

One person from Massachusetts has died and one person from Rhode Island has been hospitalized after being recently diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease following fall visits to the Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa in Whitefield, New Hampshire, public health officials said.

New Hampshire’s Department of Public Health Services is investigating the infections to identify potential sources of exposure, officials said Friday in an alert to health care providers.

Resort management said it was “deeply committed to the well-being of everyone who walks through the door” and stressed that public health officials had not determined where the infected people were exposed.

“The state has confirmed that it cannot confirm where these individuals became infected, and we are working closely with the New Hampshire Department of Public Health Services and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services to determine whether the two individuals were affected as a result of a visit to the property in the fall of 2017,” the resort said in a statement. 2023″.

“We continue to follow our strict and consistent protocols to ensure the utmost health and safety for our guests and staff while we await recent test results to confirm the potential source,” the resort said.

These cases represent the second cluster of Legionnaires’ infections reported in New Hampshire in less than a year.

In March, public health officials said they linked two campgrounds in Meredith, New Hampshire, to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that infected five people between fall 2021 and January 2023. All five were hospitalized and all stayed at Meredith Woods and Clearwater Campgrounds. Officials said the matter was complicated before contracting the disease. They have all recovered.

In the alert on On Friday, officials asked health care providers to consider Legionnaires’ infection as a possible cause in pneumonia cases acquired in non-medical settings and to ask patients whether they had traveled, including domestic trips, in the 14 days before symptoms began.

“Legionaire’s disease is a pneumonia characterized by fever, cough, shortness of breath, muscle pain, headache, and pulmonary infiltrates consistent with pneumonia,” the warning read. “The disease is often severe enough to require hospitalization and the mortality rate is (up to) 10%.”

Public health officials said the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease are often found in water and soil, and people usually become infected when water containing the bacteria becomes aerosolized and is inhaled.

Most infections occur randomly, but some outbreaks are linked to community water supplies in large facilities such as hotels, apartment buildings and hospitals, the alert said.

Globe correspondent Adam Sinnott contributed to this report.

Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com. follow him @jeremycfox.