Legionnaire's Disease Symptoms

There are various kinds of diseases, which exist today and these can have adverse effects on your health and body. The Legionnaires' disease is a common type of pneumonia, which has been caused by Legionella, a bacterium. This bacterium is found primarily in warm water environments and the trace of these diseases and the bacterium had been with the outbreak traced to a 1976 American Legion convention in Philadelphia. The other illness caused by the same bacterium is Pontiac fever, a flu-like illness. But this disease is not as serious as Legionnaires' disease.

It has been seen that most of the people who got Pontiac fever recovered within five days and they did not have to be hospitalized. The symptoms of Legionnaires' disease are development of the bacterium in the body within 2 to 10 days after exposure to legionellae. This results in loss of energy, headache, nausea high fever, aching muscles and pain in the chest. It should be kept in mind that this can also result in pains and malfunction of the bodily systems along with the mind may be affected.

The chances of the disease getting fatal are very high and will cause death if the body's high fever and antibodies cannot defeat it. Hence the victims who survive this disease may be prone to permanent physical or mental impairment. The Legionnaires' is not rare and it was perceived as rare because most cases had not been detected. All the cases which had been detected cases were not reported to public health authorities.

Also the under-diagnosis and under-reporting of this disease had also made difficult to estimate the figures, which had varied widely. The other reason for the false perception of this disease is that, when cases are detected, the public rarely hears about these. It was seen that about 65 to 80 percent in the United States and the United Kingdom had occurred sporadically and this resulted only a small percentage of cases being reported.

It is also seen that a case of Legionnaires' disease does not go undetected, if the special laboratory tests are performed. But most of the U.S. hospitals still have not made these tests routinely available and this has resulted in lesser detection of these diseases. The undetected cases of Legionnaires' are due to increased suspicion of the disease among physicians as they are involved in patient testing. There are also many hospitals, which have recognized cases of Legionnaires' disease after severe testing of patients with pneumonia and similar symptoms.

There have been various studies on the community-acquired pneumonia, which revealed that only 3 percent of sporadic cases of Legionnaires' disease were correctly diagnosed. Since the symptoms of Legionnaires' are similar to those of other types of pneumonia, there have been many cases, which are still undetected. It has been seen that the Erythromycin and Azithromycin, antibiotics are effective in treating this disease, especially when cases are detected early. But the risk of getting this disease in highly based on the immunity level of the person and the older and infants are more prone to this disease.

• Felicia Byrnes
• 12/02/2009, 12:59 AM
• 0 Comments