After 7 Deaths, Legionnaires’ Outbreak in Harlem Declared Over

The deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak that struck Harlem around Aug. 9 is over, NYC health officials said on Aug. 29, leaving seven people dead. A total of 114 people contracted the respiratory disease, and six remained hospitalized, officials added.

City officials said that they had used “cutting-edge molecular analysis” to locate the exact origins of the outbreak at the city-owned NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem, and a construction site nearby being overseen by Skanska USA and the NYC Economic Development Corporation.

These just so happen to be the sites that are cited by two construction workers stricken by the virus in separate civil suits, who are alleging negligence on the part of the contractors that employed them. The two men, Duane Headley and Nunzio Quinto, have received public support by the civil rights activists Ben Crump and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Officials say that “at least 90 percent” of the 114 people infected by the illness “had a known risk factor for severe disease,” including: being 50 years or older, smoking, having chronic lung disease or another chronic condition, or having a compromised immune system.

Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia, is caused by Legionella bacteria. It is non-contagious and spreads via water vapor, with officials announcing at one point that cooling towers at 10 buildings in the area had tested positive for the bacteria. The outbreak was reportedly contained within five separate ZIP Codes—10027, 10030, 10035, 10037, and 10039.

“Today marks three weeks since someone with symptoms was identified, which means New Yorkers should be able to breathe a sigh of relief that residents and visitors to Central Harlem are no longer at an increased risk of contracting Legionnaires’ disease—but our job here is not done,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement on Aug. 29.

“We must ensure that we learn from this and implement new steps to improve our detection and response to future clusters, because public safety is at the heart of everything we do, and we will never stop working to protect New Yorkers,” he added.

A prominent Gothamist report revealed that Legionella inspections had declined precipitously under Adams’s administration, mounting the public pressure on City Hall to contain the latest outbreak. The report cited annual data from 2017, when new testing compliance rules went into effect, demonstrating that 5,200 cooling towers had been inspected for the disease. Yet by June of this year, only 1,167 cooling towers were examined on an annual basis.

Now, health officials are adamant that they intend on altering these testing rules, calling them insufficient. In addition to announcing that the outbreak had been contained on Aug. 29, the Health Department drew attention to a proposed “package of resources and policy changes to further reduce the risk of future clusters.”

One prominent proposed change includes hiring more water ecologists to conduct tests, as well as building-system engineers to assess plumbing and mechanical systems (such as cooling towers).

They would also require building owners to test for Legionella every 30 days, instead of every 60. Preexisting fines would also be “increased” by an unspecified amount. NYC Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro made reference to these proposed measures at a press conference held with the Health Department.

“We are going to do everything that we can to make sure that DOH, going forward, can be proactive in sampling and can be rapidly responding if such a situation occurs,” he said. “This is something that we strive to do our best to respond to when it occurs, but we intend to do even more from this experience to regulate, crack down, and do everything we can to detect this disease and prevent it from occurring.”