Health Department failing to stop Legionnaires’ Disease

It’s yet another epic illustration of city government’s routine dysfunction: The same disease — Legionnaires’ — keeps hitting vulnerable communities, even though our public health officials know exactly how to prevent it. 

When even the cooling tower at Harlem Hospital — run by the Department of Health — tests positive for Legionella, the alarms should be ringing.

All the key lessons should’ve been learned from the 2015 Legionnaires’ outbreak in The Bronx, but the DoH somehow forgot them.

This is the same agency that locked playgrounds and shut down schools and churches during COVID, extending many mandates in the city far longer than in the most of the country — implicitly claiming supreme competence.

Yet these geniuses have been conducting fewer than half the cooling-tower inspections they did eight years ago. 

And they’ve basically stopped issuing violations to buildings that violate the law by not monitoring and disinfecting their cooling towers.

In 2017, DoH gave out 48,000 citations; this year, it’s heading for about 800. 

The agency lost a third of its inspectors these last three years and has failed to find replacements, even though the inspection office got a 30% boost in its budget. 

Six New Yorkers have now died from this latest outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease, with dozens more infected and hospitalized.  

All, almost exactly a decade after the near-identical Bronx outbreak. 

“We are transparent about our data,” says Dr. Michelle Morse, the acting health commissioner.

“We publish data about all the cooling tower violations and inspections, and admit we have fewer inspectors than we used to.” 

That’s great, but data transparency isn’t why we have a Health Department: It’s there to prevent the transmission of deadly diseases. 

Morse says that building owners bear the burden for monitoring, treating and cleaning cooling towers. OK, but if the city fails to inspect them, the law doesn’t mean anything. 

Plus, again, the city failed on cleaning the towers on at least four of its own buildings.

So don’t be distracted by the DoH’s lectures about longterm disinvestment in poor communities and the social determinants of poor health for black and Latino people.

Yes, asthma, diabetes and smoking — all higher in incidence in Harlem and The Bronx — are predictors for getting hit hard by Legionnaires’ Disease, but this outbreak’s cause was more about failures by the health department as well as private and public building managers in these communities.

We expect the Health Department will now be on top of this problem . . . for the next few years.

But unless city government sees some fundamental reform to stop it from forgetting again, you can bet on seeing yet another Legionnaires’ outbreak by 2035 or so.