America Is Flint

[TBF]

Today the continuing poisoning of half a million American children is tolerated partly because the victims often are low-income children of color.

A first step is to restore funding and to improve lead poisoning screening. When a child tests positive, a public health team should be dispatched to find the source and eliminate it.

America Is Flint
Nicholas Kristof FEB. 6, 2016

WE have been rightfully outraged by the lead poisoning of children in Flint, Mich. — an outrage that one health expert called “state-sponsored child abuse.”

< snip >

In Flint, 4.9 percent of children tested for lead turned out to have elevated levels. That’s inexcusable. But in 2014 in New York State outside of New York City, the figure was 6.7 percent. In Pennsylvania, 8.5 percent. On the west side of Detroit, one-fifth of the children tested in 2014 had lead poisoning. In Iowa for 2012, the most recent year available, an astonishing 32 percent of children tested had elevated lead levels. (I calculated most of these numbers from C.D.C. data.)

Across America, 535,000 children ages 1 through 5 suffer lead poisoning, by C.D.C. estimates. “We are indeed all Flint,” says Dr. Philip Landrigan, a professor of preventive medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Lead poisoning continues to be a silent epidemic in the United States.”

None of this diminishes the tragedy of Flint, which is particularly horrifying because it was delivered by the government through the municipal water system even as state officials scoffed at the local outcry. In any case, data collection is poor, so we don’t have a good handle on the scale of the problem either in Flint or elsewhere: Take comparisons with a grain of salt. But it’s clear that this lead poisoning is not one city’s catastrophe but a nation’s — and the world’s, since the situation is even worse in some low-income countries ...

Much more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opinion/sunday/america-is-flint.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

[daleanime]

1. ......

[guillaumeb]

2. Flint is open racism. A continuation of the US civil war by other means.

Recommended.

[cantbeserious]

3. ^^^ This ^^^

eom

[Cheese Sandwich]

4. West Virginia has been drinking toxic water for decades

[aswanson]

5. Agreed

I think this is a really spot-on point. I'm glad to see that this is coming up in a lot of the candidates speeches (Hillary and Bernie) especially.