What to Know: Fall Vaccines and Legionnaires' in The Bronx

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC and for our regular Tuesday Health and Science segment this week, we're going to look at a few health stories that have been in the headlines in the past couple of days and couple of weeks. First, we'll discuss the latest outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in the South Bronx, which can be traced back to several contaminated water coolers. The disease, as many of you may know, is essentially a serious form of pneumonia. Comes just a couple of months after the city saw 11 Legionnaires related deaths this summer on the Upper East Side or in Harlem. There have been 10 reported cases so far this month, including one death all in the Bronx. Both Yankee Stadium and Lincoln Hospital, which is a public hospital, have water coolers that tested positive for the bacteria.

That happened just before in the baseball stadium case. The Yankees and Mets played a three-game subway series over the weekend, at which I and more than 100,000 other people might potentially have been exposed. Then as we head into a new school year, we'll dig into the latest vaccine requirements in New York State and how they compare to that of the federal government, which has been easing up vaccine recommendations for school-age children. If you're confused about the New York versus federal recommendations, we'll try to clear them up.

Finally, if we have time, we'll talk about the recent uptick in COVID cases. There have been 500 COVID-related hospitalizations in the city between August 30th and September 5th and 12 deaths in the first week of September alone, which hardly makes the news anymore, even though that overall COVID levels do remain lower this season than in past years at this time. So what's on the agenda for today's health and science portion of the show? That's what's on the agenda. And we're joined by WNYC and Gothamist health care reporter, Caroline Lewis, to run through as much of it as we can. Hey, Caroline, always good to have you join us.

Caroline Lewis (2:14)

Hi, good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer (2:16)

So Legionnaires in the Bronx. How easy is it to contract if you're in or around a building that's contaminated?

Caroline Lewis (2:26)

Yeah. So I think, you know, this is one of the ones that I think is so tough for people because they're saying, you know, I know people want to know, like, okay, this building has a water cooling tower. Maybe this water cooling tower tested positive for Legionella. If I just avoid that, I'm safe. Right. But the way it works is I would say, like, if you're in a building, inside a building, you're actually not necessarily at higher risk for contracting Legionnaires, you know, if it has a cooling tower, because the way it works is the cooling towers have, you know, water in them that gets emitted into the atmosphere. And if that water or the water droplets contain Legionella, you know, that actually gets pushed out into the atmosphere. So you're actually at higher risk sort of walking down the street. And I think the thing that's tough is, you know, is water droplets can travel, you know, potentially several blocks depending on, you know, the conditions outside.

And so that's why the City Health Department sort of says, you know, if you're in this area, you know, these particular zip codes, you know, keep an eye out for sort of flu-like symptoms and get immediate medical attention if you have them. And so, you know, I think that's what they've been saying in this case.

Brian Lehrer (3:37)

So at least it sounds like if you're a patient in Lincoln Hospital, which by definition would make you more medically vulnerable than a lot of other people, you're not at such risk because it's not so much a risk for people inside the buildings with the contaminated towers.

Caroline Lewis (3:55)

I guess so, yeah. I think it's, I mean, obviously if you're in the area, like that's a risk there. But I think that, you know, I mean, if it's people, if it's workers going in and out, you know, I think there's always a risk. But in this case, you know, the city did say that by Sunday, they had sort of, you know, that they, within, you know, 12 hours of sort of announcing this, or identifying this outbreak on September 10th, they had sampled all of the, you know, 24 cooling towers they identified in their sort of investigation area. And that by Sunday, they had ordered them all to be cleaned and disinfected.

They had sort of, I'm sorry, all of the ones, they had identified the buildings, the cooling towers, the 10 that tested positive on the sort of initial preliminary PCR tests for Legionella and ordered all of those 10 to be cleaned and disinfected. So, you know, they haven't officially said that that process is complete at this point, but Lincoln Hospital has said their cooling tower is cleaned and disinfected. Yankee Stadium has said their cooling tower is cleaned and disinfected as of Sunday. So, hopefully, the risk is much lower if not sort of eliminated at this point for new infections.