Just How Bad Is Lead Water Contamination In Flint, Michigan?

If you keep up with the news in the United States, by now you have probably heard a great deal about the events surrounding the discovery of lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

Flint has been a city in decline for several decades. When auto plants closed and the businesses that served them closed, too, people began to leave. The people who stayed became so few that the city could not collect enough taxes to sustain itself, so the State of Michigan appointed an Emergency Manager to run the city. Among the decisions the state, and its governor made, was to save a few hundred thousand dollars by switching the city's water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. When this was done, water plant managers failed to steps to prevent the corrosion of old lead pipes, and the city's water supply became undrinkable, contaminated with lead, exposing between 6,000 and 12,000 children to lead poisoning.

Lead Is Especially Toxic to the Young

Lead poisoning isn't exactly a new problem. Archeologists believe that millions of people in Europe were poisoned by lead in fumes released by silver smelting in Athens over 2,500 years ago. Lead poisoning in adult lead miners and people who worked with lead has been recognized for centuries. Lead poisoning in children from household sources of lead, however, has only been recognized as a health issue since the 1880's, when childhood lead poisoning was first recognized as an illness by doctors in Australia.

In children, every organ in the body is affected by exposure to lead, but its greatest effects are in the brain. Lead interferes with the brain's ability to organize itself. Exposure even to small amounts of lead before birth, as an infant, or in early childhood cause lasting developmental problems, and lead that reaches the brains of children cannot be removed by methods that work for treating lead poisoning in adults, such as EDTA chelation.

When lead is eaten, drunk with contaminated water, or breathed in with fumes, it doesn't stay in the bloodstream very long. It attaches to red blood cells, but within 30 days, it diffuses into the kidneys, liver, bone marrow, and brain. That's why a simple blood test doesn't always reveal lead poisoning. Once lead gets into bone, it can stay there for decades, only to be released during pregnancy, menopause, or breastfeeding in women, and during periods of immobility in both sexes. When someone has to avoid activity, after breaking a bone, for instance, the bones release both calcium and heavy metal contamination. In this way, lead poisoning tends to show up years or decades after exposure at the worst possible time.

The symptoms of lead exposure in children are a lot like those of ADHD:

• Irritability, mood swings, and unexplained behavior patterns.
• Either hyperactivity or lethargy.
• Failure to meet developmental milestones (smiling, talking, crawling, walking, potty training) and failure to develop language.

In both children and adults, lead exposure can cause abdominal pain, loss of appetite, constipation, dizziness, headache, stupor, and coma. Men who have been exposed to lead may develop infertility and impotence; women who have been exposed to lead tend to have smaller babies or to suffer miscarriages. Very few adults die of lead poisoning, but adults also can experience mental changes after being exposed to the poison.

Why Is Lead Poisoning Still A Problem Even In The Twenty-First Century? And How Bad Is It Where You Live?

The medical profession has been aware of the dangers of lead exposure for over 125 years. Business interests, however, blocked bans on lead in common commercial products, especially those associated with automobiles, for which car making capital Flint was once famous.

In the 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's, gasoline companies actually called lead a "gift from God" which made the use of gasoline more efficient. Lead wasn't taken out of all automobile fuels in most countries until the 1990's. As a result, nearly anyone who ever lived near a highway was exposed to lead.

Lead was also added to paint to make it more durable. Nearly every house in the United States before 1978 was painted with lead-based paints. The lead in the paint makes it sweet. (Before the development of saccharin, lead was actually used as an artificial sweetener, although there is no lead in saccharine, aspartame, or cyclamates.) Small children living in houses painted with lead-based paints tend to eat paint chips and develop lead poisoning.

Flint, Michigan was an epicenter of the industrial use of lead. Not only were local residents exposed to lead from highways and peeling paint, paint that was less likely to be stripped away and replaced as the city went into a steep economic decline, and to lead from their city's aging lead pipes, which there had been no money to replace, they were also exposed to lead used in the hundreds of smaller businesses that supported the local automotive giant GM. Makers of batteries and wires and solder all used lead, and all dumped lead into the Flint River. When the state switched to Flint River water for the city's water supply, and failed to spend the money to decontaminate it before it entered lead pipes, and failed to treat it to bring it to the right pH so it would not leach lead out of old lead pipes, a predictable disaster ensued. The state saved a few hundred thousand dollars by not treating water, but now it will cost 3/4 of a billion dollars to remediate, not even counting medical expenses for as many as 12,000 children for the rest of their lives, not counting the cost of special education programs and juvenile delinquency programs that will be needed 10 years from now, and not counting the costs to law enforcement from dealing with violence that will be much more common as these brain-injured children enter adulthood.

It's natural that Flint has a major problem with lead contamination now, but just how bad is the problem in other places? 

• In Flint, Michigan, 0.3 percent of all children under the age of six tested for lead poisoning have blood levels greater than 10 micrograms/deciliter.
• In Saginaw, Michigan, 0.8 percent of all children under the age of six tested for lead poisoning have blood levels greater than 10 micrograms/deciliter.
• In Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1.0 percent of all children under the age of six tested for lead poisoning have blood levels greater than 10 micrograms/deciliter.
• In Highland Park, Michigan, 4.3 percent of all children under the age of six tested for lead poisoning have blood levels greater than 10 micrograms/deciliter.

As bad as the problem is in Flint, these data from the State of Michigan Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program show it is more than 10 times worse in some other communities in the state. And lead poisoning is not a problem limited to Michigan.

In New Jersey, 11 cities including Trenton and Newark have higher percentages of children with lead contamination than Flint. Pennsylvania as a whole has proportionally 60 times more children with lead poisoning than the beleaguered former auto making center. The Centers for Disease Control report that 12 entire states have higher percentages of children with moderate-to-severe lead intoxication than Flint, Michigan.

Your local health department can tell you whether lead contamination is a problem in your community. If it is, take steps to minimize your family's exposure, especially if you have small children or there is a pregnancy in your household.

• If you live in a house that was painted before 1978, get a lead testing kit at a hardware store or online and test a paint chip from the oldest layer of paint in your house. If it tests positive, see a professional about lead paint removal.
• Don't make the problem worse by using ceramics fired with lead glazes. Any acidic food or drink can leach lead out of bowls and pitchers. Test ceramics before you use them for food and drink.
• If your house has a Michigan basement (a crawl space that was dug out to make a basement), make sure it is well sealed, especially if your home is in a former industrial area.
• Especially if you live in New England, the Midwest, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, or Texas, where lead pipes were common until 1925, check with the city to find out if these pipes have already been replaced. (Many have not.) If your city uses lead pipes, drink bottled water.
• If you or your children have to get treatment for lead exposure, don't neglect your follow up appointments. Lead chelation with succcimer, D-penicillamine, or EDTA works, but many people are exposed to many sources of lead.