By John Thorne Barrow in Furness

The familiar blue and white of the police incident tape seals off a town centre alleyway or 'ginnell' as it is known here locally.

It's the 'ginnell' that perhaps a thousand Barrow residents use everyday as a shortcut to the shopping centre from where the town centre buses terminate.

And it's a passageway that, for weeks, appears to have been filled with the droplet mist of the potentially killer bug known as Legionnaires' disease.

The Cumbrian borough of Barrow could not be described as bustling. Perhaps once when the shipyard employed thousands of men, but nowadays it's a neat, quiet Victorian town, isolated on the Lake District coast.

No panic

And this weekend, the streets are not empty.

Business in the supermarkets and pubs is hardly dented, but there's a palpable all-enveloping anxiety in the atmosphere. A worry that has penetrated the character of the community but doesn't appear to have defeated it.

The number of help line callers continues to rise beyond the expectations of the public health experts, a tangible sign of that worry.

But Barrow families seem to have accepted the reassurances not to panic. There's no exodus from the town.

However, GPs are working overtime to check out all the flu symptoms and the irritating coughs that suddenly seem more serious than usual. And the list of Legionnaires' disease suspects continues to rise.

This morning there were special prayer services across the town - in the inter-denominational chapel at Furness General Hospital, the headquarters of this fight against the country's biggest Legionnaires' outbreak, and at parish churches throughout the borough.

Information freely available

The authorities are being most open about their campaign against this outbreak.

The hospital trust officials, the public health experts, even the borough council, whose leisure complex air conditioning plant is number one suspect, they're all keeping the public fully informed.

But it's on the wards of Furness hospital that the reality of this lethal bacterium is being faced. Anxious families like the Taylors gather around the beds of the possible victims.

Betty Taylor is comforting her husband Kenneth. He became ill during the week with the classic symptoms.

Now they await the results of the clinical tests to see whether or not it's Legionnaires' disease.

But Betty is confident and determined that Kenneth will pull through and that seems to epitomise the spirit of the whole Barrow community as it battles against the hidden outbreak.