Civil rights activists are suing the New York City government and area hospitals for their handling of a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that killed at least seven people in Harlem in July 2025.
The National Action Network announced the lawsuits against the City of New York, New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, and Skanska Thursday.
According to the lawsuits, many of the people impacted caught Legionnaires’ disease, a respiratory infection, due to bacteria located in the cooling towers at Harlem Hospital. The disease causes pneumonia-like symptoms like difficulty breathing, and can even lead to death.
Significance. The outbreak in Harlem last summer led to 118 confirmed cases and seven deaths. Out of the 118 cases, 96 people were Black.
Overlooked Angle. Research has shown highly populated urban areas where Black and Brown people reside often face disparate housing conditions and the lack of government oversight than White populated areas. Because of this, Black and Brown residents in these areas are more likely to face environmental hazards that lead to health crises such as Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks.
“Our lives mean something. You cannot act as though the lives of people and the worth of people depends on what part of the town they live in,” Reverend Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network said at a press conference on Thursday.
The legal team says their clients faced medical neglect after complaining about symptoms.
Power Structure. According to the lawsuit, the city failed to properly maintain the cooling towers that had contaminated water with Legionella bacteria. The suits faults the city and hospital for not conducting routine checks of the water and its chemicals, which would have prevented the bacteria from growing and spreading. The city found that 11 of the cooling towers in Central Harlem were contaminated, which led to the outbreak.
Workers at Harlem Hospital who were cleaning the towers were the first to get contaminated.
“I find it disheartening that after I was diagnosed with Legionnaires, that my coworkers were not notified, and I found this out a few weeks afterwards,” Nunzio Quinto, who worked at Harlem Hospital, said during the press conference. “And evidently, neither were the people in the neighborhood that lived there. They were also in danger, and that’s something to think about, isn’t it? How people try to hide when they’re doing something wrong, isn’t it?”
The Emancipator reached out to the New York City mayor’s office and the city’s Health and Hospitals agency, but did not get a response.
Lived Experience. Gloria Cooley, the daughter of one of the people who caught Legionnaires in the outbreak, spoke to the struggle of having her loved one’s voice heard.
“I had to fight just for them to take the test for Legionnaires’,” Cooley said. “They didn’t want to do that. She was transferred from Harlem to Bellevue [The hospitals] said, ‘Well, Harlem didn’t do it’… They just kept pushing. I kept pushing back. If I didn’t, my mom wouldn’t even have known she had Legionnaires because what they just flat out said was she has pneumonia.”
