Jennifer Ratner urges NYC to be global innovator on Legionnaires prevention

So my name's Jennifer Ratner.

I'm a 60-year-old long-term resident of the Upper East Side.

My dad is 86 and thankfully did not get Legionella, but lives in one of the buildings that was positive.

And I just want to start with a question I hope will be asked in the future.

So I hope that Legion...

Legionnaires disease experts will be asking in the future, wow, how come New York City has so many cooling towers, dealing with 100 plus degree hot summers, is so densely populated, and yet

every summer there are no deaths from Legionnaires disease, or very few in New York City, which

We should be the model and not just be following along and to the previous testimony, not just doing kind of the same thing year after year.

I don't understand, you know, so there's prevention, and I really applaud your bill, which, you know, if enforced properly and some of the other bills will lead to more and more prevention moving forward so that we don't have the outbreaks.

But then during the outbreak, you know, the health department had up this sign right over there before that said, why is biocide not good?

And they referred to the CDC.

I actually wrote to the Legionella team at the CDC.

Because it's very vague.

Why couldn't we do, you know, we had just a small cluster, relatively few numbers of towers that were positive.

Why not just pull the samples and disinfect?

I understand maybe you'll corrode the tanks.

But for, you know, a huge number of them, we were doing that anyway.

And, you know, waiting two days even for the PCR was probably too long in that.

And I'm not an expert on it, but I think there should be much broader discussion and just not discount that.

And so I think we should be the innovators here in New York.

So not just thinking about testing and preventing, but just be the innovators and be the model for the whole globe.

Thank you.

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