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October 09, 2015 01:00 AM

Flint water cleanup just a drop in efforts to battle lead poisoning

Andis Robeznieks
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    Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Thursday proposed a $12 million plan to reconnect the city of Flint to the Detroit water system in order to receive Lake Huron water. But advocates say it's not enough.

    Snyder's proposal, which is expected to be approved by the Legislature, comes after testing found water at Flint schools had lead levels above federal safety standards.

    Snyder's commitment is one of few examples of increased government spending on lead mitigation and lead-poisoning prevention efforts.

    Funding for the children's lead-screening program for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was slashed 93% from $29.2 million a few years ago. Last year, the program increased to around $15 million. The number of children tested has fallen by more than half over the years.

    According to a report by the Columbia, Md.-based National Center for Healthy Housing, the loss of funding meant key positions were slashed, most notable among them were outreach and education programming in vulnerable populations.

    “Funding goes up and down in waves,” said pediatrician Jennifer Lowry, director environmental health center at 301-bed Children's Mercy Kansas City (Mo.) hospital. She participates in lead-screening efforts in both Kansas and Missouri.

    “Kansas has no lead program,” Lowry said. “Missouri thinks it's an important one to have.”

    Federal funding fell at the same time the CDC halved its standards for elevated levels from 10 to 5 micrograms per deciliter of blood.

    “When they reduced it to 5, that redefined half a million children as having an elevated level,” Lowry said. “That's the same year they took all the money away.”

    When screening identifies a child with a high level of lead in their blood it usually triggers a home investigation where trained personnel can spot sources of lead exposure and take steps to mitigate it.

    Lowry said many Kansas physicians were still screening because it was considered the right thing to do, but she feels this may be falling off. She believes that, as Kansas decreases its ability to do home investigations, doctors are decreasing lead screening out of a feeling that it's an exercise in futility.

    “That's my theory,” she said.

    Lowry is working on an American Academy of Pediatrics committee updating the group's lead policy. She says that update should be completed in a few months. The nation's lead programs tend to be reactive, she explained, so the AAP is trying to change the focus to prevention.

    “There is no safe blood level for lead, so let's prevent the exposure from happening in the first place,” Lowry said.

    Missouri received four grants totaling almost $9 million out of the $112.3 million in grants awarded by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development's Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes in 2014. While that office's budget includes some money for research and home asbestos, mold and radon abatement, HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan said the bulk goes toward lead-abatement efforts in low-income housing.

    The office's budget has fallen from $167 million in fiscal 2005 to its current level of $110 million. The Obama administration has proposed increasing it by $10 million in fiscal 2016. Republican leaders in Congress have proposed cutting it by $35 million.

    Thompson

    Lead exposure can cause lower intelligence in children, less self-control in teens and criminal behavior in adults, said professor T. Lyke Thompson, director of the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit.

    He added that the results are permanent and not something kids will outgrow.

    A 2011 Health Affairs analysis calculated that the societal costs of childhood lead poisoning, such as lower lifetime productivity, totaled $50.9 billion in 2008.

    Thompson laments that the $12 million being spent in Flint wasn't spent earlier on residential lead abatement.

    “Lead is ever-present in places where there is older infrastructure and older houses,” Thompson said. “You can deny its existence, but it will catch up to you.”

    Michigan has been one state that has kept up its children's lead-screening program.

    Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at Hurley Children's Hospital in Flint, compared data from 2013, when the city was getting Lake Huron water, to 2015 measurements after the switch was made to Flint River water.

    Hanna-Attisha

    She found that the percentage of Flint children with measurements of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood more than doubled. Meanwhile, the percentage of children with a high lead-blood level who lived elsewhere in Genesee County increased only slightly and was much lower to begin with.

    “What's sad is there is already a disparity in lead poisoning, but now the disparity is widening,” Hanna-Attisha said.

    While the results of Hanna-Attisha's study were troubling, they are being credited with helping to prompt Gov. Snyder and other officials to act on Flint's water problem.

    In an attempt to save money, the financially troubled city disconnected from Detroit's water system, now known as the Great Lakes Water Authority, in April 2014.

    The city began using water from the Flint River, which was found to be corrosive and appears to be causing lead to leach from the pipes.

    The reconnection to Lake Huron water will be used until an 80-mile, $274 million pipeline connecting Flint and Genesee County directly to the lake is completed next summer.

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