Experts who blew the whistle on lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, and its impact on children said that some kids had blood lead levels far higher than those US health officials consider “elevated” – and the state knew kids were being poisoned.
As Michigan officials scramble to help the affected community, a lead researcher who helped expose the toxicity of the water, Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, said city and state officials should have known that the Flint River was highly corrosive before they decided to switch from the Detroit water system in 2014. He called the lack of water treatment “unprecedented.”
Without phosphate treatment, the corrosive water flowed from the Flint River through the city’s lead pipes for 17 months and became contaminated. Failures at multiple levels of government exacerbated the problem and delayed the response to the developing crisis.
There is a “strong correlation” between high lead water levels in Flint and blood lead levels in children, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said. A pediatrician at the Hurley Medical Center, Hanna-Attisha told to RT that the highest readings that she and the state recorded for elevated blood levels in Flint were 38 micrograms per deciliter.