The Flint water crisis may be best recognized for reigniting concerns about the levels of lead in municipal drinking water, but it’s less often associated with a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease — a severe form of pneumonia caused by waterborne bacteria that can be lethal if left untreated.
“Flint’s Deadly Water,” the new PBS Frontline investigation that first aired Tuesday, lays out a devastating case for why the extent of Flint’s 2014 Legionnaires’ outbreak — and the attendant death toll — may be far worse than previously reported.
For years, state health officials in Michigan have set the official death toll for the Legionnaires’ outbreak amid the Flint water crisis at 12 people. But during the roughly year-and-a-half the outbreak spanned, Frontline reporters found that 115 people in Flint died of pneumonia.