Emails Indicate Flint Lead Tests Withheld from Public at Snyder's Command

[Octafish]

Emails Indicate Flint Lead Tests Withheld from Public at Snyder's Command

'If there was any question as to whether the Snyder administration was more concerned about their public image or public health, this should provide a definitive answer.'

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer
Common Dreams, Feb. 11, 2016

Adding to controversy over what top officials knew and when regarding Flint's water crisis and resulting health epidemic, emails obtained by the Flint Journal suggest that Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder told state officials to suppress lead testing results, both from local health officials and the community, while they figured out how to present the information to the public.

The emails, which are from October and November 2015 and were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, include correspondence by Jim Henry, Genesee County's environmental health supervisor, to county Health Officer Mark Valacak, and correspondence between Henry and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) Laboratory Director George Krisztian.

They "show growing frustration on the county's part as it attempted to obtain information from the DEQ," the Journal reports.

Testing on buildings within the Flint School District began on Oct. 2, and Snyder gave a press conference Oct. 8 admitting that lead levels exceeded federal limits. At one school, Freeman Elementary School, levels were six times higher than federal limits.

SNIP...

"Damage from lead poisoning is irreversible," (Lonnie) Scott added. "Delaying the decision to alert the community to high levels of lead in their water for even a day is too long. The decision to delay the release of critical lead test information is a decision that children and families in Flint will have to live with for the rest of their lives."

SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/11/emails-indicate-flint-lead-tests-withheld-public-snyders-command

[morningfog]

1. Indict him.

[Octafish]

7. Possible lead exposure-miscarriage link probed in Flint water crisis

By Ron Fonger
MLive.com, February 11, 2016

FLINT, MI -- The pediatrician who exposed rising blood lead levels in young children in Flint and the state of Michigan are separately investigating whether pregnant women who drank the city's tainted water had abnormally high miscarriage rates.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, of Flint's Hurley Medical Center, and the state Department of Health and Human Services confirmed their work is already underway, but each said it is premature to draw any conclusions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says too much lead in a pregnant woman's body puts her at risk for miscarriage, as well as increasing the risk of a baby to be born too early or too small.

That's because lead can cross the placental barrier, exposing both mother and unborn child to the toxin.

In addition to increased risk of miscarriages, lead can damage a developing baby's nervous system and even low lead exposures in developing babies have been found to affect behavior and intelligence, the CDC says.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2016/02/doctor_who_exposed_blood_lead.html

[morningfog]

8. Just gets worse.

[peacebird]

2. Snyder should be injail for the rest of his life. Lead poisoning damages children permanently

[Octafish]

9. The guy's smart when it comes to running a tight ship firing people sort.

Otherwise, it doesn't make sense unless he thought he wouldn't get caught.

[phantom power]

3. I hope Snyder burns for this

[Octafish]

12. E-mails show Michigan state officials knew of Legionnaires’ outbreak in Flint in early 2015

By James Brewer
World Socialist Web Site, 11 February 2016

More e-mails have been made public showing that a year ago health officials were worried that the spike in cases of Legionnaires’ disease in Flint was connected to the use of the Flint River as a water source. When those concerns were communicated to Michigan environmental and health authorities, their response was to quash any public announcement that the city’s water was the source of the increase.

Growing tensions between Genesee County health officials and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) were illustrated by e-mail communications. In addition to e-mails publicized last week by liberal nonprofit Progress Michigan, the Detroit Free Press acquired thousand of pages of e-mails from Genesee County, also through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

SNIP...

Shurooq Hasan, a Genesee County Health Department epidemiologist, wrote in a February 10, 2015, e-mail, “We have investigated a hospital as a potential source for the disease, but have expanded our investigation to include the city water supply.

“Of our 47 cases, 25 cases have occurred within the city water supply distribution system. No common links have been found between the cases. The majority of our cases are home bound immune-compromised individuals who have not traveled and are not readily mobile.”

Due to lack of cooperation from the MDEQ, Genesee County officials contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency. On April 27, 2015, the CDC’s Laurel Garrison wrote, “We are very concerned about this Legionnaires’ disease outbreak. It’s very large, one of the largest we know of in the past decade, and community-wide, and in our opinion and experience it needs a comprehensive investigation.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/11/flin-f11.html

[GoneFishin]

4. He should be treated like any other person caught poisoning someone. I see no substantial

difference except a difference in motive, which is not a defense.

[Octafish]

13. The Contempt That Poisoned Flint’s Water

BY AMY DAVIDSON
The New Yorker, Jan. 22, 2016

Even before the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was found to be tainted with lead—before water from some areas tested at more than twice the level considered to be toxic waste, and public-health officials said that every last child in the city should be treated as if the child had been poisoned—the governor’s office knew that the water was discolored, tasted bad, smelled strange, and was rife with “organic matter.” They knew, as one memo sent to Governor Rick Snyder in February, 2015, noted, that “residents have attended meetings with jugs of brownish water.” Officials figured that a reason it looked that way was the presence of rust. And they thought that was just fine. They wished, in fact, that the residents would realize how good they had it, when it came to the water’s substance, and stop complaining about its style. Various safe-water laws, the February memo said, “ensure that water is safe to drink. The act does not regulate aesthetic values of water.” The “aesthetics” (the word comes up several times in e-mails about Flint, which the governor released Tuesday night under pressure) were bad because “it’s the Flint River”; “the system is old”; “Flint is old”—the water, in a word, fit their picture of the city, in which about forty per cent of its hundred thousand people lived below the poverty line (and more than half are black). Until April, 2014, Flint had been part of Detroit’s water system, which had Lake Huron as its source. It was scheduled to be connected to a new pipeline in 2016 or 2017, which would save money; Flint is in such desperate financial straits that it was under the oversight of an Emergency Manager. When that manager felt he couldn’t negotiate a low enough price for Detroit water in the interim, the city was left with the option of drinking from the river that ran by it, and past its active and derelict factories, and had been last regularly used decades before. The city would treat the water itself. All the city had to do was pass a few tests; as long as it did, it didn’t matter if the residents were, in effect, drinking dirt. But then, almost immediately, the water began to fail the tests. In August, 2014, and again that September, the water was found to have unacceptably high levels of fecal coliform bacteria, and specifically E. coli. Certain neighborhoods were instructed to boil their water, while the city added chlorine to the supply to disinfect it. It took a lot of chlorine—and that may be where Flint’s troubles really began. (NBC has a timeline of the crisis.) The city’s water managers, unaccountably, seem not to have added any anti-corrosion agents to the water. Nor did they check for corrosion issues in a way they ought to have for a city Flint’s size. (In a remarkable memo a year later, Brad Wurfel, the spokesman of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said that the staff had “made a mistake,” and followed the wrong protocol.) By October, 2014, General Motors had announced that it would no longer use the water, because it was corroding its equipment. It was also—and this should have been entirely predictable—eating into the lead pipes that delivered the water to people’s homes, causing them to crumble into the water. Flint is old, and its water system took decades to build. It took only months of cheap, corrosive water to mangle and perhaps permanently destroy it.

Still, the memos from the governor’s office continued to dismiss “the rusty factor” as aesthetic. It might not be good enough for G.M.’s machines, but it was fine for people. The water, as the governor’s office told the public, was still, passing the tests—except in the case of one known carcinogen, TTHM, which was produced by the interaction of chlorine and that “organic matter.” The water wasn’t passing those tests, but it was close enough, and, anyway, since TTHM caused cancer after long exposure, but not within the few years people in Flint were being asked to drink it. The TTHM regulations, a memo to the governor noted, were only estimated to prevent two hundred and eighty bladder-cancer cases each year, “out of more than 330 million people,” and so “it’s not like an imminent threat to public health.” The exchanges in the governor’s office continued to center around how to get one simple message out to the people of Flint: “residents should feel confident that their water is safe to drink unless the DEQ or City notifies them otherwise.”

The memos note that there are plenty of contaminants that the tests don’t look for: E. coli was a particular health hazard, but it should have been a proxy, a sign, like the “aesthetic” issues, that water as dirty as that might have other problems, too. The state and city seem to have ignored that basic lesson of epidemiology—they didn’t seem to register until recently, for example, that there had also been a spike in cases of Legionnaire’s Disease in Flint, which might also have had something to do with the water. Ten people died in that outbreak.

Lead is an imminent and persistent threat to public health. It can cause miscarriages and the births of babies who are too small. Children whose developing brains are exposed to lead can have developmental delays and disabilities for their entire lives. Older people can suffer memory loss, weight loss, circulation problems, behavioral problems; they can feel sick and exhausted. Lead stays in your bones even once it leaves your blood. And there were soon signs that the people in Flint were drinking lead. They weren’t told to stop using the water; indeed, for months, the opposite was the case.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/the-contempt-that-poisoned-flints-water

[berningman]

5. I'm a reasonably peaceful person but

this fool needs to be at the end of a pitchfork Pronto.

[Octafish]

14. Flint water poisoning ' a crime against humanity'

Green Left Weekly, Monday, January 25, 2016

Poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, has exposed residents to toxic levels of lead and caused drastically elevated levels of the element in children, TeleSUR English said on January 19. Michigan authorities declared a state of emergency in Flint on January 5.

That day, civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson called Flint “a crime scene” and slammed the toxic water contamination as a crime against humanity. Flint's water source was switched from the Detroit water system to the long-polluted and corrosive Flint River in 2014 in a bid to save money.

Jackson's comments came in response to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's annual State of the State address, in which he apologised to Flint residents for the crisis. Jackson also highlighted the racial injustice involved in the crisis in the mostly-black Michigan city.

The poisoned tap water in Flint has led to dangerously elevated levels of lead in children and is suspected of being linked to the outbreak of legionnaires disease that has killed 10 people.

A report released last September revealed that blood lead levels in children under five in Flint almost doubled compared to before the water source was switched. The full extent of damage to Flint's water infrastructure still remains unclear.

SOURCE: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/60944

PS: A hearty welcome to DU, berningman!

[malaise]

6. He will pay

The silence from fellow ReTHUGs is deafening

[Octafish]

15. Flint: A Tale of Two Cities

Flint: A Tale of Two Cities

by BRUCE LESNICK
CounterPunch, FEBRUARY 11, 2016

It (is) too much the way of (mainstream politicians) to talk of this terrible (crisis) as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it—as if observers of the wretched millions…and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Working people in Flint, Michigan are suffering mightily from the poisoning of the city’s water supply that resulted from callous decisions by government officials—from the unelected emergency city manager, on up to the governor and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. All of these officials acted in the name of austerity and cutting costs. But as is so often the case, the tragedy in Flint is not merely the result of individual bad actors but flows from an economic system that pits the wealthy few at the top against the vast majority who work for a living.

Despite the fact that global wealth and U.S. labor productivity per capita have both been increasing exponentially for more than a generation, the small unelected handful of financiers and industrialists that own and control our economic and political systems—the so-called one percent—have been promoting the narrative that times are hard and we must all tighten our belts. By “all”, they mean everyone except those “indispensible” titans of capital who are presently calling the shots.

But in reality, the wealth created for each man, woman and child in the U.S (as measured by GDP per capita) increased from $13,933 in 1981 to $54,629 in 2014 (in constant 2015 dollars.) That’s an increase of 292 percent! For Tunisia, the increase in the same period was 244 percent; for Greece it was 300 percent. Similar gains can be cited for other countries. (Source: World Bank) Collectively, the planet is awash in wealth.

Nevertheless, the false narrative of scarcity has been used to justify austerity in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, France, elsewhere across Europe and all throughout the U.S. And now we have Flint.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/11/flint-a-tale-of-two-cities/

[Liberal_Dog]

10. I Want To Believe That Snyder Will Pay For What He Has Done

Sad to say he probably will not.

[sakabatou]

11. True

[Octafish]

16. Michigan gets F grade in 2015 State Integrity Investigation

An honor system with no honor

By Chad Selweski
Center for Public Integrity, November 9, 2015 Updated: November 12, 2015

Overall Michigan ranks 50th out of 50 states.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/11/09/18427/michigan-gets-f-grade-2015-state-integrity-investigation

The bastards running Michigan are staging an ongoing pilot program for making piratization of government and the commons pay off.

[spanone]

17. this guy needs to go.................to jail.