For the Record
Legionnaire's outbreak - What was said
October 9, 2006

At its last meeting, city council debated this summer's outbreak of Legionnaire's disease in Hamilton and the failure of city officials to inform the public, until the story was broken by the Hamilton Spectator on September 25. Initially the newspaper reported Mayor Di Ianni and city manager Glen Peace said they knew about the outbreak in late July. Subsequently, Peace says he mis-remembered and actually found out about it and told the mayor in September. CATCH has prepared a transcription of the council discussion. Here are some excerpts.

Sam Merulla: “ The crisis occurs in July 2006. I as a councillor am told on September 18th and the rest of the public health board is told September 18th. After the crisis is over. We're informed that the crisis is over. We have maintenance people, private people in this city, frontline staff, landlords and janitors in private and public buildings, people cleaning their air conditioning units ongoing, when we have this legionnaire's disease. And we have a city council, the governing body of the city, totally out of the loop. If that's not the tail wagging the dog, I don't know what the hell is. I'll be honest with you – it's a disgrace. I had no idea. I sat in here on September 18 th . I heard deaths. I heard legionnaires. I'm thinking: what's going on here?”

….

Dr Matthew Hodge [Associate Medical Officer of Health]: “Case #1 appears to have become sick while traveling to British Columbia on a cruise when we received a report on that case on the 6 th of July. That was referred to the provincial Medical Officer of Health for communication to the provincial counterpart in British Columbia. Case #2 and 3 on July 24 and August 1 st was consistent with the usual pattern of this illness in our community. Cases 4 and 5 were reported on Sunday August 6 th to the public health staff on call. ….We came to work on the 8 th of August, after a long weekend, we communicated with the provincial lab, other MO'sH, because we now had cases 4 and 5, much more than we expected.”

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Glen Peace [City Manager]: “ I was notified by… the Associate Medical Officer of Health, and I, by choice, contacted the mayor. I had very little to tell him, I think we're all aware of that, and again I sent out an email today saying that I had erred in – and I didn't actually recognize that until last night when I started to review the time frame so I realized that they didn't match up with what I indicated to you that I spoke to you prior to leaving on my vacation versus prior to leaving on my business trip.”

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Mayor DiIanni : “Public information should always trump legal advice. I'm surprised it didn't.” Sam Merulla : “And you should have mentioned that in July. Exactly. Thank you Mr.Mayor.” DiIanni : “I didn't know about it in July. Thank you councillor.” Merulla : “According to the newspaper you did.” DiIanni : “You haven't heard anything that's been said tonight.”

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Terry Whitehead : “I was quite concerned about the motive for the date, the time, for this particular presentation [to the September 18 Board of Health meeting] and the reason I raise that is I felt, you know, when you look at this and analyze it, the only reason why this was brought to this council at the time it was is because test results were coming back and were being reported to individuals who came in contact with legionnaires. And that – it would be public.”

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Mayor DiIanni: “Have I searched my conscience to say ‘should I have done something different by informing you?' And if I'd done that what would you have done with it? Would you have gone out and informed the public? Would it have made a difference? Those are all very pertinent questions that need to be asked, and obviously as I searched my conscience, I certainly accept whatever responsibility I need to accept, but I also point out that I think I did what most of you would have done, satisfied that staff was handling the situation, and knowing that if there was something that needed to be done beyond them informing us and the public it would have been done.”

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Elizabeth Richardson [Medical Officer of Health]: “In terms of when do we communicate, in general we manage all of the investigations that are undertaken by our department on an ongoing basis. I would communicate with Glen [ Peace ] to let him know what we were at and what we were doing. In terms of passing information on to council, in general that happens in Board of Health meetings, but where there are issues in the interim, we don't have an established practice of exactly what we would do.”

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Art Samson : “…we put a lot of money into West Nile [virus] and what we get are regular updates which we get. Seems every time there's a case of West Nile, we get a blurb on it, and that blurb goes to the paper. I can't see why this particular disease can't be in the same category. If there's a spike in it, we let people know that there's a spike in it.”

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Dave Braden: “I think one member of council was told. I think others were not told. I don't think it was legitimate to go in camera [on September 18]. I made that very clear. I don't think we had the legal basis to go in camera the way we did. I lost. I think what we need to come out of here is not covering our rear end.”

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Bernie Morelli: “I think really the mistake, if there was on,e and I believe there has been, was that we need to communicate this immediately and if it means having some dialogue, some policy, the bottom line is let's not let it happen again. Let's fix it. We need to fix it. I think the last week has proven something needs to be fixed. And quite frankly, part of that is to make sure that we clearly communicate between one another and no matter how bad the story it means is if its within the acceptable response of the medical community in terms of their MO, we have to provide the input we think the community might demand from their perspective, our perspective as to what's going on with something like this and I think that we then just have to sit down and develop that communication strategy.”

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Tom Jackson: “To my dismay over the past year, I'll say for example that where I feel the Board of Health and council, and by way of extension, the broader community, we've been either embarrassed and/or reactive to public health issues….There was the heat alert issue this summer, where one of the hottest, humidest summers on record in decades. Once again we found out in a circumvented type of manner that the heat alert had been cancelled, if you will, at a mid staffing level and we were somewhat embarrassed and had to react to it and now the legionnaires.