For the past few days, Justine Kirby has been sporting an N95 mask every time she leaves her house to walk in her quiet Upper East Side neighbourhood.
She is keeping her apartment windows closed, too, as an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease grows to 46 cases, which the city has linked to contaminated water cooling towers.
The cluster of Legionnaires’ infections – a serious type of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria – has raised alarms among residents in the community, who packed a town hall in an Upper East side church this week to pose a series of questions to New York City’s health department.
“There is quite a level of concern in the community,” Kirby said. “I’m the sort of person who likes to say that the risk may be small, but until the [cleaning and disinfecting] is done, I don’t see much downside in taking these extra measures.”
As of Wednesday evening, 22 people who were sick had gone to hospital, some treated in the intensive care unit, health officials have said.
Legionnaires’ is caused by bacteria that grow in warm water, leading to flu-like symptoms that can sometimes be fatal without treatment and for those who are immunocompromised.
The current outbreak is caused by cooling towers from larger buildings where Legionella bacteria live and multiply, infecting people when they breathe in the bacteria from the mist of the towers, said Dr Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
This week, the city announced an “aggressive” plan to tackle the outbreak. On Friday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said officials had tested all of the cooling towers in the area.
New York City Health Commissioner Alister Martin said the bacteria was detected in 31 towers in the area, and 19 had already been disinfected, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News. The rest of the buildings were expected to clean their towers by Saturday.