Legionnaires’ disease blamed for 5

NEW YORK — Health officials have determined that five people who died at an upper Manhattan nursing home this past summer were felled by Legionnaires’ disease, representing the deadliest outbreak of the airborne infection in the city in seven years.

It happened at Amsterdam Nursing Home, a 409-bed facility where nine people contracted the disease — a form of pneumonia caused by inhaling Legionella bacteria — from June to early September.

The home has maintained restrictions on water use since the outbreak.

In August 2015, New York City passed the most stringent rules in the country for cooling towers, the boxy structures on building rooftops through which water circulates, and which can provide the damp, warm environment that Legionella bacteria need to thrive.

The rules require building managers to register cooling towers with the city, submit to regular testing and inspection and pay fines if they fail to comply with minimum cleaning standards, all in an effort to prevent bacteria from growing in the structures.

At Amsterdam Nursing Home, city inspectors cited the operators seven times in the past six years, records show, for infractions ranging from not conducting routine maintenance to using inadequate startup procedures for the towers. Only once was the home required to pay a fine. The six other infractions were dismissed after hearings.

Amsterdam was far from the only nursing home in the city to be cited for such violations, according to a New York Times analysis of city administrative hearing records.

The Times reviewed a database of more than 50,000 cooling tower violations recorded from 2015 to 2022 and found that about 1 in 4 of the city’s nursing homes had been cited at least once.