NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- New York City closed its investigation into a Legionnaires’ outbreak on Friday and announced more stringent testing requirements, after the disease sickened 114 people and caused seven deaths.
The Health Department said the last day someone reported symptoms from the disease was Aug. 9, leaving three weeks of no new person with symptoms. The outbreak stemmed from the legionnella bacteria growing in multiple water cooling towers in the Central Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan.
“While today marks a hopeful step forward for our city, I recognize that we are also grieving during the last several weeks, our Harlem neighbors have been impacted by Legionnaires’ disease, both physically and emotionally,” acting Health Commissioner Michelle Morse said on a call with reporters.
The city also announced new testing regulations for cooling towers. Building owners will now be required to test for bacteria every 30 days, down from the previous requirement of every 90 days. Fines are also increasing for owners who fail to comply with regulations. The Health Department will also hire new water ecologists to increase testing capacity.
The announcement comes after an outbreak of Legionnaires’ spread rapidly through Harlem across five ZIP codes, leading to more than 100 infections in weeks. The outbreak started on July 25, and the Health Department traced the origins to 10 buildings in the area.
All of the cooling towers have been disinfected, city officials said.
“We have been short-staffed and have not been able to inspect all of the roughly 5,000 cooling towers annually in the city,” Deputy Commissioner Corinne Schiff said on the call. “The way that the law works and the way it has to work is that the owners need to do this routine, constant oversight and maintenance of their cooling towers.”
Legionnaires’ outbreaks occur every year in New York, with the state reporting 200 to 800 infections annually. A 2015 outbreak in the Bronx caused 16 deaths and sparked the city to enact new testing requirements to catch the bacteria.
Legionnaires’ is a respiratory disease that causes pneumonia-like symptoms after breathing in infected water vapor, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 1 in 10 people will die from an infection, but not everyone will fall ill. Older people and current and former smokers are more susceptible to an infection. At least 90% of the people infected from the Harlem cluster had a severe risk factor, authorities said.
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