{"id":35876,"date":"2018-07-11T06:49:37","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T11:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35876"},"modified":"2018-07-11T06:49:37","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T11:49:37","slug":"how-lead-poisoning-was-discovered-in-flints-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35876","title":{"rendered":"How Lead Poisoning Was Discovered in Flint\u2019s Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Lead Poisoning Was Discovered in Flint\u2019s Water<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

The toxic water supply in Flint, Michigan, which exposed up to 42,000 children under 2 years of age to lead poisoning, was a major media story a few years back. Ingestion of high dosages of lead, particularly among infants, results in cognitive impairment, attention and mood disorders, and aggressive behavior. Mona Hanna-Attisha\u2019s account of that urban man-made disaster reads both as a detective story and as an expos\u00e9 of government corruption in her book \u201cWhat the Eyes Don\u2019t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

She brings the reader along as she uncovers Flint\u2019s calamity within the context of her experience as a Christian Iraqi immigrant living in one of America\u2019s poorest cities. Flint, the eighth-largest \u201cmajority-minority\u201d city in the U.S. (57 percent black, 37 percent white), is where a kid born will live 15 years less than one born in the neighboring communities.\u00a0 As a pediatrician working at Flint\u2019s Hurley Hospital, one of the few public hospitals left in the country, her advocacy was driven by its\u00a0 \u201cmandate to serve the community above all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although she had been an environmental activist in college, her story reveals how even the most vigilant of us must recognize that \u201cthe eyes don\u2019t see what the mind doesn\u2019t know.\u201d She begins her journey blithely comforting her patients\u2019 concerns about the quality of their drinking water: \u201cThe tap water is just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her concerns only surface when she found out, by chance, that when Flint had to switch its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River to lower its costs, government agencies were not properly checking for lead in the water supply. Her fellow health advocate, Marc Edwards, a self-described conservative Republican and civil-engineering professor from Virginia Tech, explained to her that even though the federal law required proper inspections, \u201cThe EPA and the states work hand in hand to bury problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Lead Poisoning Was Discovered in Flint\u2019s Water The toxic water supply in Flint, Michigan, which exposed up to 42,000 children under 2 years of age to lead poisoning, was a major media story a few years back. Ingestion of high dosages of lead, particularly among infants, results in cognitive impairment, attention and mood disorders, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5493,11077,11079,11080,11078,20851,20852,866],"class_list":["post-35876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-counterpunch","tag-flint","tag-lead","tag-lead-poisoning","tag-michigan","tag-mona-hanna-attisha","tag-nick-licata","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35877,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35876\/revisions\/35877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}