Legionnaire’s Probe Underway at East Village Housing Complex

Health department officials are probing whether Legionnaire’s disease is present at a housing complex in the East Village, after two residents there contracted the illness over the past twelve months. The DOH told Our Town that they believe that there is no risk of wider community spread.

One of these two patients at Haven Plaza contracted Legionnaire’s earlier this month, health officials say, with the other testing positive last June.

Residents living in the five buildings that make up Haven Plaza—which is located at 200 Avenue C and East 14th Street—have been advised against taking showers, as the bacterial disease can spread through water vapor. Taking a bath is less risky, as long as the bathtub is filled slowly.

Haven Plaza is owned by an LLC associated with Catholic Homes NY and the New York Institute for Human Development.

Residents were first made aware of the outbreak via notification letters on May 15, the DOH said, with a May 19 in-person follow-up meeting. The agency estimates that 60 to 70 people attended in person, with an additional 15 to 20 people joining remotely.

Legionnaire’s Disease, a severe type of pneumonia, is caused by the Legionella bacteria. It thrives in certain warm water environments, with the basins of untreated cooling towers serving as common outbreak origins. Health officials currently do not suspect any cooling tower as a potential source of an outbreak at Haven Plaza, however.

While most healthy people who are exposed to infected water vapor will avoid serious illness, the mortality rate can be as high as 10 percent for individuals with certain preexisting health conditions, such as lung disease or a history of smoking. Symptoms include coughing, fever, difficulty breathing, or muscle aches.

The DOH investigation comes amid heightened city testing requirements for Legionnaire’s, instituted via a City Council bill last fall, that were spurred on by a deadly outbreak of the disease that killed seven people in Harlem last summer; a total of 114 people contracted the disease, which emanated from ten separate buildings, between July 25 and August 29.

A Gothamist report from last August noted that seven of the ten buildings had not been tested for a year, alongside the DOH losing a third of their inspector workforce, despite a funding increase. A considerable degree of turnaround has since happened, with the same outlet reporting this month that the city had doubled its inspectors, as well as tripled testing frequency.

Other incidences of the disease have cropped up in Manhattan this year, before the latest probe in the East Village. The plumbing system in an Upper East Side co-op known as the Cherokee Apartments, located between E. 78th St. and E. 79th St., tested positive for Legionnaire’s in February.

At around the same time, Harlem residents living at a residential complex known as 3333 Broadway were told that Legionnaire’s was detected in a shared hot-water system.

Showers were advised against before Legionnaire’s was officially detected, although some residents reportedly found that overall communication from the Health Department about the probe was lacking.

Much akin to the East Village probe, the probes leading to the discovery of Legionella at 3333 Broadway and the Cherokee Apartments were triggered by the detection of two local cases within twelve months.