Thirteen people who worked on the renovation of a boat are infected.
An infection by pneumococcus is rampant in Marseille (Bouche-du-Rhône) and has already affected 13 people. As a precaution, 4,000 employees of a Marseille shipyard will be vaccinated Monday, February 3, told PACA regional health agency.
The Provence-Alpes-Côte d´Azur Regional Health Agency will mobilize around fifteen teams to carry out this major vaccination operation to protect workers potentially exposed on the site.
It was on January 28 that the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Regional Health Agency (ARS) was alerted by the Mediterranean IHU to several cases of pneumococcal infection in people working on renovating a boat in Marseille. A healthcare network was immediately organized with the boat’s medical team, the Samu, the Marseille firefighters battalion, the University Hospital Institute and the ARS Paca.
The workers at this site were asked to put in place a certain number of measures to limit the spread of this infection: “strengthening of hand washing, wearing of masks for sick people (3,000 masks have been delivered to the site), isolation of all suspected cases in individual cabins”, detailed the ARS.
For the CGT, these measures are not sufficient, all of the workers gathered in a general meeting on Friday asserted their right to withdraw from the site, the union told franceinfo.
“Pneumococcus or streptococcus pneumoniae is a bacterium. It can cause lung and ENT infections (ear infections, sinusitis), but can also cause more severe forms of invasive infections in 10 to 30% of patients”, specifies the ARS.
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