One particularly nasty bacteria-borne illness is currently spreading in New York City using those enormous cooling units as its vector: Legionnaire’s disease. Climate change is helping to make Legionnaire’s disease both more plentiful in the places where it already exists and creating the potential for it to move to new places where the population may not be accustomed to it. Anyone can contract Legionnaire’s disease by inhaling tiny drops containing the bacteria, and the symptoms—fever, headache, shortness of breath—appear within days. Legionnaire’s disease is a microcosm of climate change’s impact on low-income communities. The Collision of Legionnaire’s Disease, Climate Change, and Economic DisparitiesLegionnaire’s disease was first documented after an unusually aggressive pneumonia outbreak during an American Legion conference in Philadelphia in 1976.