Urgent health warning after three people contract legionnaires' disease in Potts Point, Sydney
An urgent health warning has been issued for people in an inner Sydney suburb amid several confirmed cases of legionnaires' disease.
Three people from Potts Point, aged between their 40s and 70s and unknown to one another, have contracted the disease, NSW Health have confirmed.
NSW Health is advising anyone who visited the Potts Point area between June 8 and June 18 to be vigilant and monitor symptoms of the disease.
Legionnaires' disease is a lung infection caused by the legionella bacteria, and can trigger symptoms including a fever, chills, a cough and shortness of breath.
Without treatment, the disease can be fatal.
The disease is not spread person to person and can sometimes be caused by environmental sources such as a cooling tower atop a large building, which can become contaminated by the bacteria.
South Eastern Sydney local health district public health unit director Vicky Sheppeard said all three of those who contracted the disease have been admitted to hospital.
'People can be exposed to the bacteria if contaminated water particles from a cooling system are emitted into the air and breathed in,' Dr Sheppeard said.
'Legionnaires' disease can develop up to 10 days after exposure.
'Symptoms include fever, chills, a cough and shortness of breath and may lead to severe chest infections such as pneumonia.
'People who develop this disease are diagnosed by a urine or sputum test and chest X-ray and usually require antibiotic treatment in hospital.
'Those most at risk are elderly people, people with underlying lung or other serious health conditions, and people who smoke.'
NSW Health confirmed they were working alongside the City of Sydney and have completed samples of all cooling towers with a 500m radius of the resident's homes.
All managers of cooling water systems have been urged to disinfect their systems.
'Building owners should ensure that their cooling towers are operated and maintained in compliance with the NSW Public Health Regulation 2022,' a statement read.
The outbreak comes after a previous outbreak of Legionnaires' disease between March and April this year, which infected 12 people and left one dead.
NSW Health confirmed 11 were hospitalised during the outbreak and another was treated out of the hospital.
All of those infected had spent time in the Sydney CBD between March 13 and April 5.
In April, a man in his 50s died from the infection after contracting the disease nearly a month earlier.
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The transactional logic at the heart of the IVF industry also stems from the way in which IVF babies are brought into existence — namely, in laboratories rather than in the context of a sexual act. These embryos are the object of a scientific process carried out by an IVF company. If we were ever to speak in a literal way of 'making babies', this would be it. This sense of being 'made' is increased the more 'design' and precision testing are involved in the production of IVF babies. The trouble is that the way in which we bring human life into existence shapes our own conception of human dignity. Exerting this level of power of another human being – determining not just the conditions of their existence but literally making them in a laboratory — can lead someone to think that the resultant individuals are your products . 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But we should be aware that there are endemic problems to the IVF industry that cannot be solved by an independent regulator. It is baked into the industry that those seeking IVF are treated as customers rather than patients and that embryos are treated as products . The science and the economics of IVF are intertwined and both are underpinned by a kind of utilitarian logic which objectifies embryos and children and in different ways can take advantage of vulnerable women seeking to conceive. These challenges are problems related to IVF as such and the for profit-model on which IVF is provided, rather than being a problem of neglect on the part of individual providers or an effect of a lack of robust and uniform legal standards or ethical guidelines. The ethics of IVF is not settled. Rather, the recent Monash IVF scandals show that the period of ethical querying has only just begun, because the central question of instrumentalisation was never honestly faced. We must now face what we have previously denied. Xavier Symons is Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at the Australian Catholic University.
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