A father wants to know if his daughter’s death is related to a metro Atlanta hotel that was closed after cases of Legionnaires’ disease were confirmed.
Al Garrett tells Channel 2‘s Tom Jones his daughter Cameo Garrett died after she attended a sorority conference at the Sheraton Atlanta.
Garrett said his daughter told her friends she felt ill. He and a friend later found her dead at her home.
The coroner’s office has not released a cause death.
Legionnaires’ disease is a type of pneumonia caused by the Legionella bacteria. The bacteria is contracted by inhaling contaminated water droplets into the lungs.
The bacteria normally thrives in wet environments such as cooling towers or large air conditioning units that are normally not sanitized often.
The bacteria was named after an outbreak that killed 29 attendees of an American Legion convention held at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in 1976.
Officials with the health department and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mounted an unprecedented investigation that lasted for months. The outbreak was finally traced to bacteria in the cooling tower of the hotel’s air conditioning system.
Now the same disease is connected to recent illnesses reported at the Sheraton Atlanta hotel.
The hotel was closed by the city’s health department. Hotel guests who were staying at the hotel during the outbreak were understandably annoyed that they were not informed of the outbreak.
