The Poisoned City

The bacterium loves shower heads, medical respiratory devices, and hot tubs, but it’s especially menacing when it proliferates in the distribution lines of large buildings; that’s when it puts a lot of people at risk, all at once, for Legionnaires’ disease, a virulent inflammation and infection of the lungs. It cannot be transmitted from person to person. It is purely a disease of the environment—and a preventable one.