Magilligan prison a health hazard?
The BBC reports that the NI Prison Service has confirmed that “Bacteria responsible for Legionnaires’ disease have been found in water in the healthcare centre of Magilligan Prison”. A prisoner who, had been in the 8-bed healthcare centre, tested positive for Legionella Bacterium and died on February 8 – presumably related to this report. 6 other prisoners have been relocated from the health centre. The prison holds 420 sentenced prisoners and while a review on its replacement had been announced in 2005, by January this year that replacement had still to be finalised.From the 11th January NI Prison Service press statement
“The condition of the physical estate at Magilligan Prison was a major issue for the Board, which has recommended that a new facility should be built on the Magilligan site. We have accepted that there is a need for a replacement prison and much work is in hand to take forward the Service’s estate strategy. Ministers hope to be in a position to indicate the way forward shortly.
pete, is this a grotesque way of reducing the over-crowding? Don’t answer
Stop trolling, parci.
It’s a health risk to both prisoners and staff.
sense of hmour pete c’mon
If the only comments you add to a post are throwaway ones, parci, they’ll just end up being ignored.
This is one hell of a deadly disease.
If it were in an Hotel, the hotel would be closed right now until the pathogen is eliminated.
Hope someone is working on a plan to evacuate prisoners and staff if it spreads.
It takes two extremes to occur at the same time for Legionella Bacterium to be dangerous, that is gross mismanagement of open loop water systems and a weakened immune system, (hence the greater impact of legionnaires cases in hospitals).
Its pretty sad really, management of the sanitation of open loop water systems etc is pretty simple and low cost, it just requires someone to actually do it.
This occurrence is more indicative of the state of management and maintenance at the facility, rather than the physical condition of the facility. This can happen in a brand new facility.