healthmedicinet

What happened to blood-lead levels in Flint

When Hanna-Attisha heard about the Flint River’s corrosive water chemistry, she tried to get her hands on county-wide blood samples, but a county health officer told her that the data “couldn’t be easily analyzed,” according to the Detroit Free Press. 

Undeterred, Hanna-Attisha turned to the Hurley Medical Center’s own records. When she compared kids’ blood-lead levels in Flint before and after the city switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River, she was shocked. The number of children with elevated blood-lead levels (?5 micrograms per deciliter) had nearly doubled in Flint. Even worse, more than 6 percent of children in zip codes with high levels of lead in the water reported these elevated levels.

Officially, more than 10 micrograms per deciliter of lead in blood constitutes lead poisoning, but increasingly, expert groups like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agree that there’s no safe level of lead in blood.

“We know lead and we know the life-altering, multigenerational impact of lead,” Hanna-Attisha said. “If you detect lead in a child, there’s a public health, environmental problem.”

Hanna-Attisha’s research isn’t complete, she said, because it didn’t include blood samples from infants. Lead paint is the primary source of poisoning in the U.S., where water is generally safe. Because of this, kids typically don’t get screened for lead until they turn 1 or 2, when they are more likely to be crawling around a home and putting objects in their mouths. 

In the case of Flint, a city of just under 100,000 people, infants who drank powdered formula mixed with lead-tainted water and unborn babies whose mothers drank tap water are also at risk.

“Our research completely underestimated that risk,” Hanna-Attisha said. Her findings will be published in the American Journal of Public Health this month. 

How Flint and other state or government agencies will ultimately respond to the situation is yet to be determined. Weaver, who was elected in November, said the city will need to increase its budgets for special education and mental health services. 

“We need funding and we need resources,” she told NPR, speaking about the state of emergency. “It’s an infrastructure crisis for us, so we know that’s going to be a tremendous cost and burden on the city of Flint that we can’t handle by ourselves.”