Officials say climate crisis ‘worsening our exposure’ to bacteria as at least 28 people sickened in Manhattan

Jessica Glenza in New York
Thu 9 Jul 2026 10.00 EDT

A New York outbreak of legionnaires’ disease, a rare but severe form of pneumonia, highlights the microbe’s growing and disproportionate impacts in a warming climate.

At least 28 people have been sickened in an outbreak on the Upper East Side, a wealthy neighborhood between Central Park and the East River in Manhattan. Health department officials, seeking to stop the outbreak, have sampled water from nearly 160 building cooling towers to test for the bacteria.

“This is now a subtropical climate,” said Dr Alister Martin, the commissioner of the New York City health department. “It is absolutely true that climate change is worsening our exposure and increasing the propensity for legionnaires’ disease clusters like we’re seeing today.”

Martin said the city has taken an “aggressive” approach to the outbreak, even as the chances of developing legionnaires’ disease are “extremely, extremely rare”. Martin revealed to the Guardian that he signed orders for at least 19 buildings to drain, clean and disinfect cooling towers, which are part of large buildings’ heating and cooling systems. These were described as “buildings of interest” by another official, who said the city would still need to conduct extensive tests to understand which building may have been responsible for the outbreak.

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