Speaker Menin questions Commissioner on source identification delays

Thank you, Chair Shulman.

Thank you so much, Commissioner, and to your team for being here today and for your testimony.

I know I have a lot of questions, and I'm sure my colleagues do as well.

So I'll begin with some of them, and I'll probably then come back on a second round as well.

So I really wanted to start off with asking if you've determined the source of the 2026 cluster.

I obviously saw what you said in your testimony, but have you been able to winnow it down from a source for a residential building, a commercial building, or a city-owned building?

Yeah, first of all, thank you again, Speaker Menon, and thank you, Chair Shulman, for bringing us here today.

Before I talk about where we are with the source, let me just say a few words about the 11 New Yorkers who have passed.

Each one of those deaths is a tragedy, and our hearts are with the loved ones, with the friends, with the families.

And each New Yorker who lost their life, their life,

in this process requires us to examine every single thing that we can about this response and to identify ways to push our nation-leading Legionella laws even further.

Now, to answer your question directly, the process of identifying the exact match, pinpointing the cooling tower or tower, is it responsible, is still ongoing.

We're doing something called whole genome sequencing right now.

My hope is that we're going to be able to provide a match, that there will be one or two, as there were last year, matches.

But we don't have that data back yet.

We should be able to report on that later this summer, or later this fall.

I guess my response to that is why is it taking so long?

Because in the Harlem outbreak, the department released the results of the source within 35 days or so.

In the Bronx outbreak, they released their results, and I believe it was 26 days.

So it's now been two months.

Yeah, thank you for that question.

This is a very complicated process where we're looking to make the match between the DNA that we take from the bacteria in the patient's samples and to match them to the DNA that's in the bacteria in the associated cooling towers.

And so this process is complicated, it's complex, and it takes time.

Let me pass it to Dr.

Howard to share a little bit more about the process and where we are.

Sure.

Thank you for the question.

So as you heard earlier, that there were over 180 cooling towers.

We had 59 cooling tower samples that were culture positive.

And for each of these cultures, we may have multiple isolates that undergo whole genome sequencing.

We actually do two different culture methods.

And for each culture, there can be...

More than one isolates.

One of those cultures is a solid culture that's done on a petri dish.

And depending upon the sample, we can have five colonies of bacteria that grow, or we could have 20.

And there can be more than one species of Legionella that grow on the petri dish from that one

cooling tower sample.

And so the technicians will sample isolates from multiple colonies on the petri dish.

So they are doing whole genome sequencing on over 300 isolates.

That includes isolates both from the cooling tower samples as well as from a handful of patients.

And that takes time.

After we have the whole genome sequencing is the analysis to look for that potential genetic match, an identical fingerprint between patient samples and environmental samples.

So when will we expect then precisely to have the...

These results?

We expect that later this fall.

Okay.