Legionnaire’s Disease Strikes 16 at Reunion in Colorado; 3 Die

An outbreak of legionnaire’s disease at a 50th high school reunion was blamed Thursday for the deaths of three elderly celebrants and the pneumonia-like illness of 13 others.

State health officials contacted 250 other people from 21 states who attended the Lamar High School reunion for the classes of 1937 through 1941 but found no new cases, Dr. Ellen Mangione, a Colorado Department of Health epidemiologist, said.

Since the disease has a four- to 10-day incubation period and the reunion was held in late September, Mangione said it is “not likely” that the outbreak will spread.

Because of this, she said, the health department recommended but so far is not enforcing temporary closure of the hotel where the reunion was held.

However, the owner of the Cow Palace Inn in Lamar, about 200 miles southeast of Denver, said the facility would close voluntarily on Monday, while a team of health investigators tests the hotel’s ventilation, heating and water systems in an attempt to trace the bacteria which causes legionnaire’s disease.

State health officials are consulting with the federal Centers for Disease Control, and the CDC is assisting in testing.

Health officials are also contacting 12 other groups which held conventions at the Cow Palace in September and early October.

“There’s a potential for continuing risk, but we feel it’s relatively small,” Mangione said. “We’re reevaluating it hourly and it’s possible that we’ll tell them to close before Monday.”

One of the 13 surviving victims remained hospitalized Thursday. Although laboratory results are back on only one of the 16 cases, Mangione said it is “exceedingly likely that all the others are legionnaire’s disease.”

Colorado has reported 37 individual cases of legionnaire’s disease in the past five years but this is the first outbreak. Nationally, the disease is fatal in about 15% of the cases and can be effectively treated with antibiotics. Symptoms include high fever, headaches and loss of appetite. The disease is most common in men over 50, smokers and people in frail health. The Colorado victims were in their 70s and 80s.

The mayor of Lamar, Nancy Turner, told Denver’s KUSA-TV Thursday night that “we don’t think they caught it in Lamar . . . . They could have brought it with them. At least two of the people who were sick in Lamar had been very ill for several months.”

Mangione noted that there had been several outbreaks of legionnaire’s disease across the country since the 1976 American Legion convention at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in which 34 died, and the current Colorado outbreak “isn’t one of the biggest.”