Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Was the Flint Water Contamination a National Disaster?

President Obama declared the incident a National Disaster and channeled very large funds to the City of Flint. For all the scandal and accusations of systematic racism, and the jailing of eight EPA professionals, I am still wondering what was the real damage if any of the whole media carnival. From a professional magazine's comments column:
Dear Ms Jerome, It is not true that hundreds of children had high blood levels/ Please stop repeating that myth and falsehood. Read the CDC and other reports of thousands of blood leads taken before during and after the switch back. About 2 % were temporally raised by about 2 ug/dl. There were no "brain damaged "children! 

The magazine refers to a study that found 5 ug/dl - I am not qualified to evaluate the difference, but seems to me that the differential damage must have been minimal as no follow up studies have been published. According to the Wiki, one in forty American children have more than 5 ug/dl, which makes me think that Flint's lead levels were "normal" in the American context. The fact is that I am not alone in suspecting that the whole thing was made up for political reasons. May be I am wrong. 
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3 comments:

  1. GraniteerNovember 28, 2018 at 8:06 AM

    It doesn't seem to quite add up, that minute quantities of lead are highly toxic, and yet lead was ubiquitous a few generations ago.

    How are these reconciled? Were there tens of millions of mentally-addled among the generation born ~1920? Did people not notice? Was it hushed up as a politically undesirable fact?

    I suppose there are some other possibilities, e.g. the toxic effects of lead are exacerbated by obesity or some other condition that is common today but was rare back when lead was on every wall.

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    1. JNovember 28, 2018 at 11:43 PM

      The studies conclude that "IQ declined by 7.4 points as lifetime average blood lead concentrations increased from 1 to 10 µg per deciliter."

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4046839/

      My take: (1) There were tens of millions of mentally addled in the past. (2) People did notice but having no point of reference, it was considered normal, (3) Was it hushed up? No, there were studies here and there but about extreme lead poisoning and never about light ones.
      In real life, it is difficult to assign low IQ to lead poisoning. In case of Flint, the population is not very brilliant, so a few points lost can easily go unnoticed. I mean not only Flint but the population in general.

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    2. GraniteerNovember 29, 2018 at 9:00 AM

      I guess that makes sense. A decline of a few points in IQ would be hard to notice, but is perhaps significant in aggregate.

      On the other hand, that paper sure needed a lot of statistical gymnastics to get where it wanted to get. So I'm not sure.

      In any event, I'd certainly wager that the children of Flint have more problems from excess sugar than from excess lead.

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