Whether your building is newly constructed or even 100+ years old, chances are, sooner or later, it can become colonized with opportunistic premise plumbing pathogens (OPPP’s) such as Legionella. 

As facultative intracellular pathogens, meaning they are capable of living either inside or outside of other host cells, Legionella enters your building water system(s) as an endosymbiont of another organism.  Translated:  they hitch a ride into your building inside of amoeboid cells which, incidentally, function as their natural host organisms in the aquatic environment.

Should your Water Management Plan (WMP) Program Team decide to utilize environmental water sampling to validate the effectiveness of the WMP, ANSI/ASHRAE 188-2018 advises that these tests should be performed by a laboratory accredited to a nationally or internationally recognized standard (e.g., ISO/IEC 17025:2017), with Legionellaa included in the laboratory’s scope of accreditation.

Before environmental sampling is undertaken, a Sampling Plan should be formulated.  This plan should list the devices and Points of Use (POUs) to be sampled, at what frequency sampling will be performed, what the acceptable control limits will be, and what the response protocol will be for any sample result(s) falling outside of the previously-established control limits. 

We are often asked to review, audit, improve upon, or otherwise comment on Water Management Plans (WMP’s) consisting of no more than a few pages of boilerplate text which, in reality, are actually NOT Water Management ‘Plans’ at all.  Rather, they are simply Legionella control policies.

So, what’s the difference between a “Policy” and a “Plan”?

Policy (always a noun):  a course, principles, rules, guidelines, etc., proposed or formulated by an organization, government, business, or individual, typically published or promulgated throughout the organization, in order to direct organizational behavior towards (or away from) a particular goal, objective, or condition. 

We detected the presence of Legionella in one or more of our building water systems….. Now what do we do? This is probably the second most commonly asked question, surpassed only by:  “Do I have to test my water systems for Legionella?”  Often the question is posed this way:

“We recently performed Legionella testing on our building water systems and found one or more positive sample results.  What should we do about it?”

Each day people all over the world are exposed to ice. Whether it be from their refrigerator ice machine, their favorite restaurant, during their hospital stay, or on an airplane, people sip on their ice cold beverages or suck on ice chips unaware of the microorganisms that could be sitting dormant within the ice.