Legionnaire’s disease has been identified as the illness that killed 16 resident at a Toronto nursing home.
Since the resident deaths occurred late last month and earlier this month, the illness has been contained and no new deaths have been reported, according to Toronto’s health department. The outbreak occurred at the Seven Oaks Home for the Aged in the Toronto suburbs.
A type of pneumonia, the disease is named after a severe outbreak that affected a meeting of the American Legion in Philadelphia in 1976. An estimated 8,000 to 18,000 cases of Legionnaire’s occur each year in the United States, but only a fraction of these are reported, officials said.
