None of five government agencies aware of the outbreak in Genesee County investigated the water system for Legionella despite concerns raised by the county’s Health Department over the water as early as October 2014. The Legionnaires’ cases started popping up as Flint residents were complaining about the foul-smelling, discolored water flowing into their homes after the city switched to a new water source, the Flint River, in April 2014. Mr. Monahan, now 58, was given antibiotics and eventually recovered, but his case turned out to be at the leading edge of a Legionnaires’ outbreak that sickened at least 87 people in the Flint region, killing nine of them, from June 2014 through October 2015. Rick Snyder’s Jan. 13 press conference announcing the outbreak, Michigan health officials said it was impossible to know if the cases were connected to Flint city water because of a “lack of clinical isolates” — samples of Legionella collected from patients.
– The water in Flint, Michigan, still hasn't been tested for the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease despite being the likely source of an outbreak that killed nine people and sickened another 78 between May 2014 and November 2015, the Detroit News reports. The New York Times alleges the deadly outbreak was handled the same way the larger Flint water crisis was: through "a failure to act swiftly to address a dangerous problem or warn the public." In fact, state officials didn't even let the public know about the outbreak of Legionnaires' until last month. The outbreak started six months after Flint switched to the Flint River as its water source. Genesee County raised concerns about the water being a likely source of Legionnaires' in 2014, and five government agencies—including the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, and the EPA—were aware of it. Not one of them followed through by actually testing the water. One Flint resident who contracted Legionnaires' tells the Times he believes the state doesn't want to know if the water caused the outbreak because it doesn't want to be tied to the deaths.