Disease detectives scour site

Country Meadows is a sprawling mobile home community for people older than 55 with its own golf course and a community center where senior citizens sitting in chairs sometimes play volleyball with an inflatable beach ball.

Until last week, the 799-unit park off Sam Allen Road was a carefree place for people from all over the country to retire.

Then Gene Swanson, a 76-year-old retired tool-and-die maker from Michigan, contracted Legionnaires' disease. Saturday, he died. Two more residents have confirmed cases of the disease.

No one is certain where the three park residents contracted Legionnaires' disease, a flu-like malady caused by a naturally occurring bacteria usually found in contaminated water sources such as pools, hot tubs and fountains. No one is sure how many more of the park's 1,000 residents — if any — may have it.

By Monday night, fear gripped the community as rumors spread.

Enter the disease detectives.

Hillsborough County officials, seeking the cause of the outbreak, have dispatched teams from the Environmental Protection Commission and the Health Department to the park.

The EPC checked out the park's water treatment plant, waste treatment plant and reclaimed water system.

The health department sent a nine-member team of epidemiologists and environmental health inspectors to solve what has become a frantic medical mystery.

"We take this very seriously because there are three cases in the community," said health department spokesman Steve Huard. "Scientifically, with what the epidemiologists are doing, they are literally disease detectives."

The fear at Country Meadows has been intense since Swanson died, said residents' association president James Butterworth, who called an emergency meeting of residents Tuesday evening.

"The residents are panicked and scared, and I want to calm their fears," Butterworth said.

Representatives of the park's management company, ELS, referred questions to the company's corporate headquarters in Chicago. Officials there did not return a call for comment.

Butterworth, 60, spent decades working as a senior operations manager in the corporate world and has experience in crisis management. As association president, Butterworth said it is his responsibility to get answers and present them to the residents.

"I got so many phone calls (Monday), I lost count," he said. "Dozens of people called concerned about this."

Other association members were called as well, he said.

"They have been swamped," said Butterworth, who has lived in the park and an adjacent one, The Lakes, for four years and been association president for a year.

Adding to the mystery, investigators learned Tuesday that while Swanson and a male resident who contracted the disease had used the hot tub, the third victim, a woman, had never used the pool or hot tub, Butterworth said. No new cases were been reported Tuesday, according to health officials.

The first step in the investigation involved health department workers walking around the park, taking pictures, looking for anything that could be a source of contamination, Huard said.

"They will go to the pools and the fountains," he said, "anything that would put out a vapor or mist that would meet the criteria for forming Legionnaires' disease."

Investigators also are talking to the survivors and their families and other park residents to find out everywhere they had been recently, Huard said.

Once possible sources are found, investigators will go back and collect samples to determine whether the bacteria are still present. With heavy rains expected, weather is an important factor, Huard said.

The whole process will probably last into next week, Huard said.

But that doesn't mean a definitive answer will ever be found.

"It could be a prolonged time before we find anything," he said. "With three cases for the most part unrelated other than they live in the same community, it may be very hard."