New York City’s largest outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in years has sickened at least 108 people and killed at least five, and has officials scrambling to contain the outbreak. But public health experts say the conditions that made parts of the city fertile ground for the disease this summer have been spreading widely, and all Americans need to understand the risk factors involved.
“This is not just a New York City problem,” said Hannah Greenwald Healy, a professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health. “I think of it as a problem in industrialized countries. We’ve been seeing increases in Legionnaires’ disease for decades now across the United States, across Canada, and across a lot of European countries.”
New York City’s Legionnaires’ outbreak linked to cooling towers
As USA TODAY’S Eduardo Cuevas has previously reported, Legionnaires’ is a severe form of pneumonia caused by a bacteria called Legionella. The bacteria − found naturally in freshwater − grows in warm or hot water, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease spreads through mist containing bacteria that people inhale.
In New York, officials have tracked the summer outbreak to the cooling towers – the external structures that regulate the temperature in large buildings. Those towers rely on water to “lift that heat away,” Healy explained. When that water in turn heats up, it provides the ideal breeding ground for Legionella…