Hospital Probed for Signs of Disease : Health: Officials seek to determine if emergency room personnel at Western Medical Center-Anaheim have come down with Legionnaire illness.

State and county health officials have launched separate investigations at Western Medical Center-Anaheim to find out if several emergency room staff members have come down with Legionnaire’s disease.

Despite the need for the investigations at the hospital, county health officials said that a preliminary review of the case found no evidence of the disease at the facility.

“All the evidence so far indicates that there is nothing to worry about,” said Dr. Rick Greenwood of the county’s public health division.

Legionnaire’s disease is transmitted through the environment, never from person to person. The legionella bacterium grows in water and can be spread through the air by large air-conditioning systems, decorative fountains or other water sources.

The probes come less than two weeks after Orange County health officials, working on a similar investigation, tentatively concluded that a Westminster mental health clinic was not harboring legionella .

Greenwood and a spokesman for the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration said that investigations began last week after their offices received complaints that some hospital emergency room personnel may have been exposed to legionella.

Officials declined to identify the sources of the complaints.

Greenwood said that several of the emergency room staffers had blood tests taken, which showed they had developed antibodies to the disease. However, other evidence suggests that the laboratory analyzing the staffers’ blood samples may have erred in reading the results, he said.

In addition, hospital staff could have developed the antibodies at any point in their lives, so it “would be difficult to know when or where they might have been infected,” Greenwood said.

Carolyn Catton, chief operating officer at Western Medical Center, said that the hospital had done a thorough investigation and found no evidence of legionella at the facility.

Catton said that the hospital has checked a temporary air conditioning unit in the emergency room for the bacteria and found nothing suspicious.