Chair Schulman on who is at risk and whether bacteria spreads between towers

When there is Legionella growth in a building's cooling tower, who is at risk of infection?

Does someone have to live in the building or physically enter the building to be potentially exposed?

I'm sorry, Chair.

Can you repeat that?

When there's Legionella in a building's cooling tower, who is at risk of infection?

Does someone have to live in the building or physically enter the building to be potentially exposed?

You're saying no, but I'm just asking.

Yeah, we are concerned when there's a cluster about the whole geography, right?

Because as we talked about earlier, the microscopic water vapor can have Legionella bacteria in it, and it can spread across the neighborhood.

So that's why we issue broad guidance in those zip codes.

So here's an interesting question.

Can Legionella bacteria spread between cooling towers?

That is an interesting question.

Let me hand it to Corrine Shipp to talk about that.

It is an interesting question.

We have asked it ourselves.

We don't know.

Interesting.

Do all cooling towers that test positive in a specific area contribute to the cluster?

Do all cooling towers in a...

That tests positive.

Contribute to the cluster.

In a specific area contribute to the cluster.

Okay, this is...

Yeah, so this is important.

There's two questions that...

we're trying to answer when it comes to the sampling and the testing in the region.

The first question we're trying to answer is, is there a genetic match between the Legionella that's part of the sputum that we get from the patient to a specific cooling tower?

That gives us the ability to say this cluster came from this cooling tower.

So that's the first question.

That's whole genome sequencing can make that match.

There's a separate question that we're asking in a cluster, and that is which cooling towers have high levels of Legionella bacteria in it.

And those two questions.

Are answering different parts of the operations.