Health Law

Salmonella Outbreak at Maine Assisted Living Center kills 1, hospitalizes 1 more, sickens 7 total

By Drew Falkenstein

The Bangor Daily News reports that a Salmonella outbreak at Quarry Hill retirement and assisted living facility has left one person dead.  Another person had to be hospitalized.  7 people total were affected by the outbreak. 

'The resident who died repeatedly declined treatment before being admitted to the hospital,' Christopher Burke, director of marketing and communications at Pen Bay Health Care, said Wednesday morning.  Pen Bay Health Care is the parent organization of Quarry Hill and also of Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport, where the person died on Feb. 2.

The affected residents lived in the assisted living and memory impairment assisted living wings of the facility, Burke said. The person who died lived in the assisted living wing. The other person hospitalized is recovering and expected to return to Quarry Hill on Thursday.

The Maine CDC sent two epidemiologists to the health care facility to try to find other sick residents and to identify a possible source. The experts also worked with facility staff to increase their education about salmonellosis, the infection caused by the salmonella bacteria.

Sears said efforts to track the cause of the outbreak have so far been fruitless.

'It's usually food-borne to start with. We looked to try to find a food source,' he said. 'Oftentimes when we start investigating, the food's gone. It's gone, it's been consumed, there isn't any way to find one thing that everybody ate.'

The strain of salmonella in the Camden outbreak has been identified as javiana, Sears said.

He said that the Maine CDC has not seen other salmonella outbreaks from that strain in the state recently and that the problem appears to be 'slowing down' at Quarry Hill, with no new cases reported in days.

Full post as published by Food Poison Blog on February 10, 2011 (boomark / email).