Legionnaires’ Disease: Some City Council Members Blame Mamdani

The Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak that recently plagued the Upper East Side has killed five people as of July 24, with a total of 82 total cases reported. Eight people are currently hospitalized as this newspaper went to press. With the Health Department reporting no new cases in over a week, the blame game picked up, especially on the City Council, revealing some sharp divisions among politicians on how the the Mamdani administration handled the crisis.

City Council members at a July 21 town hall led by Speaker Julie Menin were sharply critical of the Mamdani administration’s early response to the Manhattan outbreak, particularly his Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

Menin, Harvey Epstein, Virginia Maloney and Liz Schulman— who had introduced the tougher testing standards bill that passed in May— were among those who convened at Lenox Hill Hospital to discuss the disease that impacted the Upper East Side neighborhoods of Carnegie Hill and Yorkville. The crisis follows an outbreak in Harlem last year that killed seven and an Alphabet City outbreak earlier this year.

Defending the Health Department

But not all solons joined in the criticism. Mayor Mamdani on July 22 pushed back, saying “What we have done time and time again is follow public health experts and their advice,” Mamdani said. He said he believes the city has eliminated the source of the initial cluster and no new cases have been reported in the past ten days.

On July 24, State Senator Liz Krueger said, “We must acknowledge the work of NYC Health Department staff, who saved lives by acting quickly and aggressively, listening to the experts, and following the best epidemiological practices.”

The New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM) likewise defended its commitment to alert the public about Legionnaires’ Disease.

“We’ve had some great conversations with Council Member Schulman about including information related to Legionnaires’ disease in our National Preparedness Month education efforts, and we look forward to working with our partners across government and beyond to provide New Yorkers in every community with the information they need to prepare for emergencies of all types and sizes,” NYCEM Senior Press Officer Alexia Nizhny said in a statement to Straus News.

Looking for Real-Time Response

City Council members announced that they will push a new legislation package that includes a real-time public health response database and hotline, as well as requiring immediate proactive disinfection of cooling towers, and strengthening inspection capacity.

Dana Cruz, president of the tenant association for Haven Plaza, an Alphabet City apartment complex and one of the first sites of Legionella detection this summer, shared sobering anecdotes from a building where the bacteria was discovered in the building’s plumbing system. That makes it harder to resolve the problems than the UES where the problems are believed to be from water cooler towers.

“We have had the health department come in and talk to us, but the end result is we’re not allowed to shower,” Cruz said. “We have 370 units in our complex. No one’s allowed to shower. And this has been going on since May. I don’t know most people in New York City that can handle a situation in the middle of the summer with no showering allowed.”

She said about one-fourth of the complex is either immuno-compromised or seniors who are expected to carry buckets of water to bathe, and that property managers should be ashamed of themselves.

“I’ve heard from so many constituents who lacked essential information on disease risk, on exposure, on prevention,” Menin said. “They were not sure how they should stay safe, how the spread was evolving, whether they should remain at home, or if it was okay to walk in the city streets.” She added that her team learned about the second death associated with the outbreak from a news report, rather than official city channels.

The Health Department has insisted it is only discouraging showers for immuno-compromised residents. But some health officials were recorded discouraging showers, at least in the early days of the outbreak.

Schulman highlighted the legislation she championed following a Legionnaires outbreak in Harlem last summer, legislation she said hasn’t been acted on, despite its enactment in May. The legislation requires building owners to test their cooling towers for Legionella bacteria every 31 days when the towers are operating (three times more frequent than stipulated by past regulations). Bacteria like Legionella thrive in warm climates.

Council member Mercedes Narcisse of CanarisBrooklyn, a former nurse and chair of the city council committee on hospitals expressed frustration over the city response to the outbreak and said subsequent fatalities were preventable.

“There’s no explanation for the folks that lost their lives through the process,” Narcisse said.

Council members said that the Department of Health and Mental Hygeine (DOHMH) had failed to efficiently communicate which cooling towers were marked uncompliant with the legislation and to whom they issued fines.

“I appreciated that the health department did a number of town halls, but for those of us that were at the town halls, I think that frustration level was mounting because people really wanted more proactive testing,” Menin said. “About 25 percent of the towers were not compliant with Council Member Schulman’s law, meaning they were not providing the test results that they were supposed to.”

She said that the Council will hold an oversight hearing in September “to examine the administration’s insufficient response,” to this outbreak. We have a lot of questions and we want to get answers there.”