A Cunning Bacterium Has Been Found in the Cooling Tower of the Guggenheim Museum, Infecting People Through Clouds of Vapour

A cunning bacterium has been found in the cooling tower of the Guggenheim Museum, infecting people through clouds of vapour. The bacterium is called Legionella, and its history belongs to the twentieth century. It was isolated after 1976, when participants in a convention of the American Legion fell ill at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia; twenty-nine people died, and the source turned out to be the air-conditioning system. Before the age of central cooling, Legionella lived in warm waters inside amoebae and interested nobody; the advent of climate control in the premises of large buildings gave it an entirely new habitat and prospects rather better than those offered by swamp slime. [Text missing in the original: ...] breathe in this watery cloud of pleasure, the Legionella begin to behave like insolent invaders. If the bacterium makes its way into the human body, it manages to deceive the immune cells and to begin multiplying furiously, causing a severe form of pneumonia, named Legionnaires' disease.

The museum reports that only technical staff have access to the tower, that treatment has been carried out, and that a repeat analysis is due next week. Wright's rotunda [text garbled in the original] is needed to maintain a constant environment and conditions of [sic: "владности"] suited to museum exhibits. On the Upper East Side, meanwhile, thirty-six cases of Legionnaires' disease and twenty-two hospitalisations have been recorded, and inspectors are checking the cooling towers in a hundred buildings.