Toxic vapor kills fifth person in New York City
Legionnaires' disease, a kind of pneumonia that spreads from toxic water vapor, has also infected 108 people since the outbreak began at the end of July, according to the New York City Health Department on Monday.
The latest death was 'under investigation for some time and our team was able to confirm this death as part of the cluster today', stated the department.
Twelve cooling centers in Central Harlem tested positive for Legionella bacteria, which grows in warm water and can be transmitted when the liquid becomes steam.
All the affected centers were drained and disinfected on Friday.
The disease was airborne at health centers, residences, various businesses and a college in Harlem, which is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan.
They include NYC Health + Hospitals Harlem Hospital, NYC Health Department Central Harlem Sexual Health Clinic, The New York Hotel Trades Council Harlem Health Center, The New York Hotel Trades Council Harlem Health Center, Harlem Center Condo, Commonwealth Local Development, and the CUNY City College Marshak Science Building, among others.
The number of cases is growing but the rate has declined, a sign that it has likely been contained.
Authorities are still investigating which cooling tower was the source of the outbreak.
Details on the people who died and those battling the disease have not been released.
High-profile attorneys Ben Crump and Reverand Al Sharpton said they plan to announce a lawsuit on Wednesday against a construction company they believe caused the outbreak.
Legionnaires' disease symptoms include a fever reaching 104 Fahrenheit or higher, muscle aches and severe headaches.
People can die from lung failure, kidney failure, decreased blood flow to the organs, or a septic shock.
About 1,000 Americans die of Legionnaires' disease per year and 8,000 to 10,000 become infected.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Brain-eating amoeba with 97% fatality rate found in Australian drinking water
MORE: Map shows Hurricane Erin along US East Coast threatening to isolate barrier islands
MORE: Food influencers narrowly escape death after car crashes into restaurant table mid-review
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
4 hours ago
- Spectator
Britain owes America for its ‘free' healthcare
'A friend of mine who's slightly overweight, to put it mildly, went to a drug store in London,' Donald Trump said aboard Air Force One. Earlier he had told reporters: 'He was able to get one of the fat shots. 'I just paid $88 and in New York I paid $1,300. What the hell is going on? It's the same box, made in the same plant, by the same company.'' You can see why the dealmaker-in-chief was irked. And when Trump is irked, someone usually pays the price. In May, the President signed an executive order for 'most-favoured-nation prescription drug pricing for American patients'. It was a warning to drug companies, as well as other countries, that Americans were tired of paying nearly three times more for the same medicines as patients abroad. The US is home to less than 5 per cent of the world's population and yet American consumers account for almost three-quarters of global pharmaceutical profits, because manufacturers heavily discount their drugs overseas and make up the difference by inflating prices in the States. As the President puts it, 'freeloading' foreign customers 'get a free ride'. He's not wrong. But while Trump may get his wish in stopping overseas health systems from getting cheaper deals, it's not obvious that profit–making companies will cut their prices in America. The more likely response is that they'll raise them everywhere else. Eli Lilly, the American pharmaceutical giant behind the weight-loss jab Mounjaro, has announced that from September the recommended retail price of its strongest monthly dose in Britain will leap from £122 to £330 – inflation of more than 170 per cent. The company knows the NHS won't actually pay that much: it has already negotiated substantial discounts for the doses it prescribes. But by hiking the list price on the highest dose (which relatively few patients use), while cutting the private deals on lower doses, Lilly can appease Washington and protect its market at the same time. For now, anyway. But demand is picking up. In Britain, around 1.5 million people are already on weight-loss drugs, with 90 per cent paying out of pocket. Most take Mounjaro, while a smaller number are on Wegovy, the sister drug to Ozempic. Novo Nordisk, the Danish manufacturer of Wegovy, has agreed to keep its UK price low for the time being. But costs will eventually be driven up for Wegovy users too if Mounjaro users, faced with a much bigger bill, convert to Wegovy en masse, squeezing supply. Fat loss clinics are already seeing a 500 to 600 per cent increase in Brits switching to Wegovy, which – come September – will cost half the price of Mounjaro. Trump's war on drug pricing will affect other areas of British medicine too. Weight-loss jabs have become the symbol of American pharma – and its many excesses – but they are by no means the only miracle drug we get for cheap. Take Casgevy, a US-made gene therapy that can treat the blood conditions beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease. One dose costs more than £1.6 million at list price. Thanks to its clout as the country's single dominant buyer, the NHS has secured a confidential – though significant – discount. Casgevy's eye-watering price is easy to justify: therapies at the frontier of medicine cost billions to develop. British politicians love to remind us that the UK is a world leader in life sciences, and in many ways that's true, but it's the US that is funding nearly half of all global life-sciences research and development. Trump, in typical fashion, wants the credit – or at least cheaper price tags. But drug makers won't cut their profits; they'll shrink everyone else's discounts. The NHS's bargaining power may shield patients for a time, but price rises are coming. UK officials know it, too. Even before the latest hikes on the fat jabs, government papers released alongside the US-UK trade talks in May noted that the NHS would look at the concerns of the President. No prime minister or health secretary could openly sign up to higher drug costs borne by the NHS, but they knew Trump had not finished going after what he considers to be unfair trade practice. The uncomfortable truth for the British is that as much as we mock US healthcare as extortionate and venerate our NHS as sacred, we live off America's excess. The American healthcare system is Britain's greatest scapegoat: it's absurdly expensive, highly inefficient and still doesn't manage to provide universal coverage. Indeed, it's the only healthcare system in the developed world that can distract from just how poor our own is: a 'National Health Service' that falls short of practically every standard and target set for it. The NHS survives only because we ignore its outcomes. Measure after measure shows that plenty of people are being failed by an expensive, yet decaying system. Britain spends around £36 billion a year on pharmaceuticals, £19 billion of that coming from the NHS. Medicines are already the health service's second-biggest expense after staff. But that number would be a lot higher without America. Britain may be world-class in medical research, but we spend just 0.3 per cent of GDP on drug research and development, compared with America's 0.8 per cent. American money makes Britain's drug research possible. And for years, until drugs lose their patent, Americans pay exorbitant costs which subsidise the NHS's bargain prices. This model which so annoys Trump perhaps helps explain why the NHS continues to enjoy such widespread public support, despite its many failures. We'll tolerate months-long waiting lists, worse survival chances and outdated facilities if we have cheap or 'free' access to life-changing medicines. But will we put up with the broken system if we have to start paying a fair whack for drugs, either directly at the pharmacy counter or indirectly through the increased taxation that would be needed to fund them? The government won't give up our bargain pricing without a fight. Quietly, and at significant political cost, health officials will roll out a new strategy. We're never going to pay American prices for drugs – the 'free at the point of use' funding model simply could not afford it. Instead, we'll try to make our research environment so attractive to manufacturers that they'll reward us by maintaining drug discounts. That's the real motivation behind Wes Streeting's planned reforms for the NHS, which are championed by his supporters as a way to improve the patient experience and attacked by his critics as a covert means of privatising the health service. Take the single patient record, which NHS England says will give 'every part of the NHS a full picture of the patient'. Perhaps – but it will also make it far easier to identify people for clinical trials and medical research. Look at the partnership between the Wellcome Trust and the government to create a £600 million health data research service. The stated aim is to 'simplify access to health data and speed up research'. But it also makes Britain an attractive place for pharmaceutical companies. The offer is simple: we'll make it as easy and welcoming as possible for you to do your research here, you've just got to keep paying for it. This is the part British politicians never want to say out loud, especially when it comes to healthcare: someone, somewhere, is always paying for it. Drugs aren't 'cheap'. The NHS isn't 'free'. There are always trade-offs: either higher prices, longer wait times, or uncomfortable deals and data swaps with Big Medicine. No matter how you spin it, Britain's 'free ride' is coming to an end.
Metro
6 hours ago
- Metro
'Mutant' deer covered in fleshy bubbles spotted in the US
This year has not been too kind to animals in the US. Americans have spotted so-called 'Frankenstein' rabbits oozing sluglike tentacles from their faces and 'zombie' squirrels covered in sores in their back yards in recent months. Now, social media users in New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, among others, say they're seeing deer covered in fleshy bubbles. 'A white-tailed deer in Pennsylvania. But what is the growth? Is it a mole? A boil? An injury?' asked one Reddit user earlier this month. Clay Moden, a radio show host at WYRK in Buffalo, uploaded trail camera footage of a deer with 'some sort of growth on it' in early August. Don't go sprinting to your bunker out of fear we've got a Last of Us fungal plague on our hands, though. The deer are infected with deer cutaneous fibroma, a mostly benign infection that can't spread to other species, including humans. Better known as deer warts, this strain of fibroma is mainly found in young white-tailed deer and mule deer. It can cause up to two dozen hairless tumours to appear on the animal's body. The warts, sometimes as small as a pea to as large as a football, pop up on a deer's head, neck and forelegs. These lumps don't cause the deer any pain, but can hinder their ability to walk, eat or see. Deer generally overcome the disease on their own within a few months, as the growths slowly dry up and fall off. One user on X noted last Thursday: '…This deer in my yard. [The warts] got worse, then three months later, they were gone.' There's no known cure or treatment and it's recommended impacted deer be left alone. But if a deer is particularly struggling because of the warty lesions, you should call your local wildlife agency. Fibroma is transmitted through biting insects, such as mosquitoes, so deer are more likely to contract it in the summer and autumn, when the bugs are most active. Deer can also be sickened with fibroma by directly contacting a surface where the virus is wriggling on, or by rubbing against an infected deer. The creatures often trot along the same trails or nibble from the same feeding spots, making transmission possible. 'Fibromas are more commonly seen in male deer, suggesting that fighting may play a role in transmission of the virus,' according to the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab. The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife advises that hunters who harvest an infected deer skin the animal. The infection caused a scare in 2019, when viral Facebook posts blamed the bulbous deer on a brand of weedkiller, which is not the case. Many mammals have their own version of deer warts, called papillomas. Papillomaviruses are behind the recent cases of cottontail rabbits covered in black spikes, which are also spread by mosquitoes and ticks. This includes humans, too – human papillomavirus (HPV), a common sexually transmitted infection, can cause genital warts. Dr Omer Awan of the University of Maryland School of Medicine told MailOnline that we might be seeing more 'gross' pictures of animals in the future for two reasons. More Trending As humans continue to burn fossil fuels, spewing planet-warming pollution into the air, climate change will make the Earth warmer, helping blood-sucking critters like mosquitoes to thrive. But another reason for any increases in sightings might not seem as obvious. 'People are starting to talk about it more, they're starting to document it more on social media,' Dr Awan said. 'Hence, there's been a lot more discussion about this.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Toxic vapor kills fifth person in New York City MORE: Map shows Hurricane Erin along US East Coast threatening to isolate barrier islands MORE: Food influencers narrowly escape death after car crashes into restaurant table mid-review
Economist
8 hours ago
- Economist
RFK Jr's attack on mRNA technology endangers the world
DURING THE covid-19 pandemic new vaccines were rolled out with unprecedented speed. The fastest to arrive were jabs built from molecules of messenger RNA (mRNA) designed to teach the body how to fight off the disease-causing virus. By late 2021, mRNA vaccines had saved an estimated 7.7m lives globally, including most of the 3m Americans whom the Commonwealth Fund, an American health-care charity, estimates were saved by vaccines before 2023.
