- The Observer,
- Sunday December 31 2000
'One isolated case isn't serious, two is irritating, but four - that's really disturbing,' said Professor Jean-Yves Fagon, head of the hospital's intensive care unit. Twenty-three people have died of the disease in the Paris region alone this year.
The first case of the disease was detected at the European Hospital Georges Pompidou in Paris on 12 December and a second on 18 December. Three days later, on 21 December, Chirac and other French dignitaries, including former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and Paris Mayor Jean Tibéri, trumpeted the technological triumph of the revolutionary 827-bed hospital at its inaugration ceremony.
Two more cases of the disease were found last week and two more are suspected at the hospital. Now the outbreak has become a huge embarrassment to one of the most ambitious health care projects in French history. One of the four patients has since died but not, according to a hospital spokesman, because of legionnaires' disease. Some services had been closed pending an investigation. Patients have been prohibited from taking showers until the cause of the outbreak can be detected.
Outbreaks of legionnaires' disease, a form of pneumonia, are caused by water contaminated with bacteria. Exposure can come from shower heads, taps and drinking water, aerosol mists and cooling towers.
Those at most risk of infection are people with weakened immune systems, and with chronic lung disease. People on dialysis and those receiving chemotherapy are vulnerable too. According to hospital sources, most of the cases were discovered at the cardio-vascular surgery unit.
The European Hospital Georges Pompidou in south-west Paris, which opened to patients in July, has been touted as the hospital of the future. Twenty years in gestation, it was designed to revolutionise health care.
Multidisciplinary teams move around the patient rather than the other way round. Services are clustered in groups so that the specialist comes to the patient. Patients arrive at one of 22 different reception points to be met by a personal hostess, who guides them to their private room, where the computer is at the bottom of the bed, case notes are computerised and robots carry out operations. It has swimming pools, health clubs and cafés. There are even indoor palm trees, in a glass-topped, 220-yard galleria.
But the hospital has been plagued with problems. When it threw open its doors to the public this summer, two years later than planned, it was not able to receive patients. The logistical difficulties of transferring patients from three old hospitals serving a region of 570,000 people and merging more than 5,000 medical staff into one team proved too much. But, even before the first patients arrived, the hospital was consuming a budget of £130 million every 18 months. Over the intervening months, patients have been transferred, but the process has been remarkably slow, chiefly because the computer systems have broken down repeatedly. This month porters went on strike to demand more staff. The hospital is not expected to be fully functioning until the middle of next year.
At the inauguration ceremony just before Christmas, Chirac tried to reassure protesting staff. 'This hospital prefigures what the hospital of the twenty-first century will have to be like.' As the search for the cause of the outbreak of legionnaires' disease goes on today, France's medical profession must be hoping that Chirac is wrong.
