Photo: AFP
An outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in Harlem has sickened at least 70 people and killed three. It is the first large outbreak of the respiratory disease in three years; five people died in a Manhattan nursing home the last time New York experienced an outbreak. City officials say the disease is treatable if caught early, but many people confuse symptoms with those of other diseases and don’t get treatment, thinking they have merely a cold or other condition. That raises two key questions: how does one contract Legionnaire’s, and how does one recognize and treat it? Dr. Gregory Poland is the leader of vaccines and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program with some advice on how concerned we should be about the condition.
Dr. Poland described for host Larry Mendte how Legionnaire’s disease spreads and why an outbreak needs to be taken seriously. “This is a bacterial illness, where these bacteria, when systems are not maintained properly, harbor in the cooling towers and water systems, and so they go through the water pipes, though the water system, you inhale them and you get ill. It’s not contagious person-to-person; rather, you have to inhale the bacteria yourself, and for the most part people don’t recognize that this is anything different. They get flu-like symptoms- a cough, headache and fever- but it can get rapidly worse. In fact, about ten percent of people who get Legionnaire’s disease die from it.”
One of the diseases that is similar to Legionnaire’s is Covid, but Dr. Poland says that, despite a recent uptick in Covid cases, there is some good news five years after the outbreak that turned the world sideways: “It’s not that the virus is weaker; it’s that at this point nearly all of us have either been infected, received multiple doses of vaccine or both, so out immune systems are sort of prepped and ready to diminish the effects of it.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images