Flint children who have been impacted by the city’s water contamination emergency are not a “throwaway generation” and should be helped, the pediatrician who helped uncover the lead poisoning crisis said Tuesday.
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Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha told the state’s special Joint Committee on the Flint Water Public Health Emergency that increasing children’s access to “proper nutrition, medical care, developmental testing, and early intervention” could help address the long-term impacts of the city’s water crisis, according to the Flint Journal.
“This is not a throwaway generation,” Hanna-Attisha told the committee. “Our children are going to be fine, but they’re going to be even better if we invest in them now.”
“We need so much to give to these children now so they don’t have the consequences,” she said. “Everybody is impacted differently and part of the anxiety with lead is we’ll never know that lead directly caused this.”
Hanna-Attisha’s research helped uncover high levels of lead in Flint children’s blood last year, but she noted on Tuesday that even medical tests would not be able to determine the true extent of the crisis, as lead is only detectable in the blood for 20-30 days—but the damage lasts forever.
“Everybody should be under the assumption that their child was potentially exposed,” Hanna-Attisha said. “That does not mean that children, all these children are going to have problems.”
The testimony comes shortly after Hanna-Attish described in a January interview with Democracy Now! how the Flint government initially attempted to discredit her findings.
Meanwhile, a former Flint water treatment plant supervisor recalled to the Associated Press in an interview Tuesday how Michigan officials instructed him not to add anti-corrosive chemicals to the pipes, shortly before the state started drawing its water from the Flint River in April 2014.
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