Garden Variety Illness? Man Survives Freak Legionnaires' Infection

Sept. 3, 2010— -- Pity the poor British fellow who learned that puttering in the garden can be, in rare instances, hazardous to one's health.

Researchers have published a case report involving a 67-year-old man admitted to a hospital in March after spending eight days suffering from fever, shortness of breath and confusion. The doctors' diagnosis was pneumonia, but they were at a loss to find the underlying cause, according to the report this week in The Lancet.

Initial tests came back negative for several pneumonia-causing viruses. But a fluid specimen taken from inside the man's lung cultured positive for a rare strain of Legionnaires' disease -- the potentially fatal and eponymous respiratory illness named for a 1976 outbreak among American Legion conventioneers in Philadelphia that sickened 221 people, including 34 who died. Legionella bacteria most often spread through tiny droplets of water spewed from cooling towers, hot tubs, showers or -- in the 1976 outbreak -- air conditioning systems. They do not spread from person-to-person.

In the British case, though, doctors were trying to figure out how a man who tinkers in the garden could become infected with typically airborne Legionella.

Further investigation revealed that the patient had cut his finger while composting two days before his symptoms began. Several published cases in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Scotland, as well as California, Oregon and Washington state, involved men and women who used compost mixes, compost heaps and potting mixes to plant tomatoes or bulbs, and contracted a strain called Legionella longbeachae, isolated in 1981 from a pneumonia patient in Long Beach, Calif. Subsequent tests in those cases confirmed the presence of Legionella in potting soils they handled.

Fortunately, the gardener responded to antibiotics. But the case has ongoing ramifications. The Royal Horticultural Society in Great Britain has issued warnings about the possibility of contracting Legionnaires' from touching compost and will begin posting cautionary advice on bags of potting compost.