Lead Poisoning from US Tap Water

How a Concerned Mother and Her Pediatrician Uncovered Flint, Michigan’s Lead-Laden Tap Water

LeeAnne Walters’ four children started getting sick around November of last year. Her 14-year-old, J.D., was in and out of the hospital, and her four-year-old twins, Garrett and Gavin, would get scaly, itchy rashes whenever they took a bath. “I could see the water line on Gavin’s stomach,” Walters says. In February, the pediatrician wrote a note to the city saying that Gavin, who has a compromised immune system, couldn’t consume the water.

City officials came out to test the Walters’ tap that same month and found lead levels at 397 parts per billion. For reference, anything greater than 15 ppb—what the Environmental Protection Agency considers an acceptable level—can result in irreversible damage to a child’s brain. In fact, the EPA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agree there’s no truly safe lead level.

“A child with lead poisoning presents with nothing. They are completely asymptomatic,” says Mona Hanna-Attisha, director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Children’s Hospital at Michigan State University and the doctor who released the blood-test results last week. “But in five years there’s an increased likelihood that the kid’s going to need special-education services. In 10 years, there’s an increased likelihood that the kid's going to have ADHD, mental health issues, and behavior issues. And in 20 years, it’s going to be a problem with the criminal justice system.”

Lead is a very stable element that tends to stick around, whether in the environment or the human body. A study published recently—from researchers in nearby Detroit—found that, when a pregnant woman drinks leaded water, the toxin can get into the eggs and sperm of her child, possibly affecting the woman’s grandchildren. So this problem in Flint might have longer-lasting effects than we currently realize.

A blood-lead level of five micrograms per deciliter or higher indicates lead poisoning. Four-year-old Gavin’s level was 6.5. His mother complained to the mayor’s office, which did little to address the problem. Finally she found someone who would listen: Miguel Del Toral, a groundwater and drinking-water regulations manager with the EPA.

When presented with the evidence (and with some digging himself), Del Toral wrote an interim report to his boss explaining why the agency should take over Flint’s water management. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality wrote off Del Toral as a “rogue” employee. Then Del Toral referred the concerned mother to Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies corrosion and lead.

In August, Edwards and a team of researchers asked Flint water consumers to send them hundreds of samples from their taps. This time around, the lead level at the Walters’ hit more than 13,000 ppb—and that was after the water had been left running for 25 minutes. Most of the other samples showed lead levels over acceptable levels.

“ We are smack-dab in the middle of the Great Lakes, and we do not have safe water,” Hanna-Attisha says. The test results she released found that, in some areas of the city, typically the zip codes of low-income families, the percentage of kids with elevated blood-lead levels has doubled from 2.1 percent to four percent since last summer.

Meanwhile, Brad Wurfel, a media correspondent for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, told the  Detroit Free Press  that the city’s own water testing found lead to be within the acceptable limit of 15 ppb (he did not respond to a request to comment). But Wurfel also admitted that, during the last round of testing, the agency received back less than one-third of the bottles it had sent out for sampling. The agency was also supposed to identify households at high risk for lead exposure and test their water, but it has given no indication it did that.

Source: Pacific Standard

Read More Related Content On This Topic - Click Here

Media

Taxonomy

• Public Health
• Pollution
• Drinking Water