A baby who was diagnosed with legionnaires disease is in a “critical condition” at Nicosia’s Makarios children’s hospital, state health services organisation (Okypy) spokesman Charalambos Charilaou said on Saturday.
He said that the baby is “receiving all appropriate treatments”, with news of the diagnosis having been made public on Friday.
The health ministry had on Friday announced that the private hospital at which the baby was being treated when it caught legionnaires disease, and where it had been born, had had its operations suspended, pending further tests.
It added that it had already “carried out checks and sampling in the hospital’s water supply network”, and that preliminary results showed the presence of the legionella pneumophila bacteria, which causes legionnaires disease, in the network.
Other babies being treated at the hospital have been transferred elsewhere, while Okypy said it has no information about any other such incidents at any other facility in the country.
The United Kingdom’s national health service describes legionnaires disease as “a lung infection you can get from inhaling droplets of water from things like air conditioning or hot tubs”, and that it is “uncommon but very serious”.
It does not typically spread from person to person, but instead only through the inhalation of water droplets contaminated with the bacteria, which ordinarily grow in man-made water systems.