“He was failed at every turn,” mother says after son dies of legionnaires’ disease

Bereaved mother says Montreal’s public health department should have investigated the source of contamination and warned other tenants in the 40-unit building that they might have been exposed.

A Montreal mother is seeking answers after her 35-year-old son died on Dec. 13 of legionnaires’ disease, possibly caused by a broken hot-water heater in his Côte St-Luc apartment building.

Yet Montreal’s public health department has not investigated the source of contamination or warned other tenants in the 40-unit social housing building at 5620 Emerald Ave. that they might have been exposed.

Legionnaires’ disease is caused by inhaling aerosols (tiny water droplets) infected with legionella bacteria from contaminated sources like cooling towers for centralized air-cooling systems, hot water heaters, indoor decorative fountains and shower heads.

“He was failed at every turn,” said Lynda Hoffman, who called the 811 health-information service two days before the death of her son, Aaron Kaufman, and was told not to bring him to a hospital because his symptoms were compatible with COVID-19.

He was weak and suffering from a severe headache, hallucinations and cold symptoms, she said.

“He felt awful and scared. He was disoriented,” Hoffman said.

Kaufman, who worked at the IGA in the Côte St-Luc shopping centre, was in the autism spectrum and had had pneumonia two years earlier, she said.

“He was failed by 811, failed by the medical system that’s overburdened by COVID, failed by the people who run the building he was living at and failed by public health for not telling anybody in the building what was going on,” she said.

When Kaufman did not answer the phone on Dec. 13, Hoffman went to his apartment and found him dead.

On Dec. 21, coroner Majorie Élisabeth Talbot informed her by email that the autopsy results showed her son had legionnaires’.

When Hoffman informed maintenance staff in the building that her son had died of legionnaires’, they checked the building’s two hot-water heaters and discovered one of them was not working, she said.

On Jan. 5, maintenance workers cut off water from the defective heater, said Marika Leclerc, director of Gérer son quartier, a non-profit organization that manages the building, which is owned by another non-profit, Les Habitations communautaires N.D.G.

Leclerc said the water heater will be replaced but there are no plans to test it for legionnaires’ because the public health department said that’s not necessary, since only one person died.

She added that public health officials also said there was no need to inform residents, for the same reason.

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