Twice in recent years, my South Bronx neighborhood has been shaken by public health crises.
A year ago, Ebola was the concern as my community is home to a large West African immigrant population.
This month, the area has been ground zero, as more than 100 residents were stricken by Legionnaires’ disease. Ten South Bronx residents — about 10 percent of those who contracted the disease — have died, tragically and unnecessarily.
On Friday, Health Commissioner Mary Bassett acknowledged that “New York City is experiencing the worst outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in its history.” She claimed, however, that new cases are declining, and “we’re optimistic that we’ve seen the worst of this outbreak.”
Let’s hope so. Yet by Thursday evening, the city had held only one mobbed town-hall meeting, after quietly disinfecting five of 17 cooling towers where the disease-causing legionella bacteria were detected.
Didn’t this neighborhood — indeed, the whole city — deserve a quicker and more aggressive response?
When asked how the disease had hit such a wide swath of the South Bronx, Deputy Commissioner Jay Varma said his department didn’t know.
But the scientific literature reports cases where the bacteria have traveled more than 1Âą/â‚„ miles in mist. When you draw a radius of 1Âą/â‚„ miles from the Opera House Hotel, you have the hot zone where people were sickened and died.
Over a third of the cooling towers in the South Bronx tested positive for legionella. By any measure, that should have triggered an immediate citywide effort to identify and treat every cooling tower system in the five boroughs.
Yet it wasn’t until Gov. Cuomo big-footed his way into the issue that the city finally ordered all building owners with cooling towers to test and disinfect for Legionnaires.
Bassett and her epidemiologists failed to quickly identify how and where more than 100 people were exposed. So rumors abounded, frustration rose and mistrust set in.
In the nearly 40 years since the original deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak occurred in Philadelphia, and given the annual outbreaks here and elsewhere, it’s mind-boggling that no rules or regulations were put into place to prevent deadly new eruptions of the disease.
To his credit, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz was the first to call for legislation enacting inspection standards.
When a Legionnaires’ outbreak in Quebec City in 1996 sickened 170 people and killed 13, that outbreak was traced to a cooling tower in a building co-owned by that city and a labor federation.
A subsequent outbreak there in 2012 that killed six and sickened 81 was all the more tragic because recommendations for preventative measures in 1997 were ignored.
One suggestion was to create a registry of buildings that use cooling towers, so an outbreak could be more quickly isolated. Another called for tougher regulations for inspecting and maintaining the towers.
During the 2012 outbreak, Quebec inspectors climbed atop a skyscraper to look out over the city and visually tally the number of cooling towers.
Last month, New York City officials relied on Google Earth to locate Bronx cooling towers — a process that no doubt delayed efforts to contain the outbreak.
In an outbreak that has claimed the lives of 10 percent of victims, it’s a mystery why the health department didn’t go door-to-door to check on residents over age 50 in the hot zone.
It makes no sense to wait until officials find a genetic match between the pathogens in an infected cooling towers and those infected before taking bold action.
Legislation, while necessary, is contingent on the City Council taking measures at some future date. But for people living in the hot zone, certainly more immediate action is required.
Perhaps, Diaz is correct in calling for an “all hands” response to this Legionnaires’ outbreak.
State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker on Thursday said New York faced a health crisis and a confidence crisis. He was right.
And Cuomo, who was ubiquitous during the Ebola crisis, is to be applauded for “big-footing” onto the scene in an effort to restore public confidence. With the vulnerable lives at stake, Bronxites deserve at least that much.
Michael Benjamin served as an assemblyman from The Bronx from 2003 to 2010.