Flint’s Children Suffer in Class After Years of Drinking the Lead-Poisoned Water
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Either case hopefully they can turn things around for the kids who have to grow up in this situation.
Anyway, it was about a school district that had given IQ tests to all the kids. The black kids on average scored significantly lower than the white kids. This could not be explained by the white kids going to better or richer schools, because this district was well integrated. Black kids and white kids that had been together in the same classrooms for their entire school history showed the same IQ gap.
The district concluded that the test was biased and was going to ignore it. One teacher decided to look deeper, and started looking to see if he could find some other factor besides race that was significantly different between the black and white kids.
He realized that all the white kids lived in relatively new housing, and all that black kids lived in much older housing. The black kids' houses were all built long before lead paint was banned. The white kids' house all came after that ban.
They arranged to test the kids for lead, and to test their houses, and they found that most of the black kids were suffering from lead exposure. None of the white kids were.
The lead paint was removed from the black kids' houses, and the kids were treated for lead poisoning.
A couple years later, when the district gave another IQ test, most of the gap between the black and white students was done.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17451672
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20390814
This is why specifically lead is highlighted.
Just more of the extremely high cost of being poor.
I fail to see the disrespect or anything else untoward about his actions there.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-drinks-filtered-ci...
If instead he starts in with a lecture about how it's cumulative exposure, affects children more severely, and that is why he won't take a drink as a publicity stunt, he knows that all that will be reported is "Obama refuses to drink Flint water!"
This wasn't a planned stunt in my estimation (unless you think the reporter was "in on it").
But ignoring all of that -- why is it a good thing that he said the water was safe? The water wasn't safe to drink, and the video of the President sipping water from Flint means that the entire country collectively agreed that the situation was fixed. But it wasn't fixed -- the water in Flint is still contaminated with lead today.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ZynkD3N_k [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjugN-nUHh8
The thing I'm referring to as being clearly staged is when he asks in the middle of a speech (where he was talking about things that need to be done in Flint) for some water, takes a tiny sip (he must've been really thirsty!) and continues. If you don't see that as being staged, I really don't know what I could possibly say to convince you otherwise. People from the crowd were shouting "don't drink" and he counters with "I know I'm going to be okay, because I've already had some Flint water."
And you're right that he mentions it's filtered (after being asked that in a follow-up and not when he first did the stunt, but whatever) -- but just because he's not outright lying about the situation doesn't make it the earlier stunt any less staged. There has been very little further outcry about Flint in the past 6 years, because most people you talk to will say "Oh, wasn't that thing in Flint solved years ago? Obama drank the water when he was there!
Was that not the case?
Looks like they're still available for free pickup: https://www.michigan.gov/flintwater/0,6092,7-345-73954-36627...
https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-skolnik-lead-poisoni...
Probably to laugh and say instead of "trying the water" he will see the water is sent to a lab for proper scientific testing and the results published to the public.
There are similarities with people who virtue-signal by working with children in a ghetto of a 3rd world country, and get photographed doing it - while actually living in the comfort of a luxury hotel and just showing up in the ghetto for a brief time. The intentions may be very good but people may still perceive it as hypocrisy. (Not particularly blaming Obama for this, he maybe in fact came to a situation where there is no good way out.)
The general public doesn't really know that. People think that lead is this magical chemical that manically makes people stupid if they so much as lay eyes upon it. I guess that's better than thinking it's harmless but it's certainly non-optimal from a societal decision making standpoint. I would be very surprised if the reporter knew that the lead content of the water was mostly irrelevant to an middle aged man drinking one glass.
I have literally never heard a single person from the area say anything but neutral to positive things about Obama's visit.
And the filtered water in most places has been EPA-compliant for a long-ass time.
But at those levels, it makes no difference at all. They may as well be equal. If there are 10 elephants sitting down on top of you, it probably won't matter if an eleventh elephant comes along and takes a seat on that stack as well.
Now that I'm actually seeing the data, I kind of think we shouldn't even be talking about schools for these people. They have way bigger problems. I thought we were talking about levels maybe 2 or 3 times the globally accepted standard. Which is still too much, I get that. But that's all the more reason that levels 25 to 30 times that standard are just not even on the charts. These are levels literally an order of magnitude higher than I thought they were.
Flint may be slightly worse numerically, but at those levels, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of material difference in impact?
In 1976, the median amount of lead in the blood of young children was 15 µg/dL. This was considered normal and healthy at the time. In the Flint crisis, the kids who were exposed to lead were generally testing between 5 and 10 µg/dL.
source: https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/flint-children-lead-expo...
This is not by way of meaning to be blasé about the situation. More to highlight that even the country's highest authorities on the subject were enough laxer about it until recently enough that you really do need to be on guard about it for yourself. A 7-year-old CDC guideline will almost certainly have trickled down to your pediatrician's practices, but it probably hasn't had enough time to have much impact on your local building codes or any other local government policies. 8 short years ago, what happened in Flint would not have been considered a problem.
This is of course horrible. They’re not the only municipality with lead in its water. But people spend a lot more time and money on the painful wart on their neck than the removed plight of others.
This is a natural and beneficial form of decentralization. I don't expect you to be concerned that my grandmother broke her hip. It's properly a big deal to my family, but not even a blip for yours. I want daily/several times per week updates on her progress; you don't.
We all have a finite amount of time, attention, and money, and while I probably know more about the origin of the Flint water situation than the average American (owing to the latter being near zero rather than deep expertise on my part), I'll be honest that I'm more worried about the water quality in Cambridge, MA and in the schools my kids attend.
There are millions of unfortunate or even tragic events unfolding in the world in any given week. It's unreasonable to assume that everyone should care about all of them or judge the situation to be "of course horrible" when we don't. We'd get nothing done as a society if we stopped to mourn every tragedy everywhere or to get weekly updates on years-long remediation efforts.
I sincerely hope that the city of Flint is able to address the entirely city-inflicted (though funding related) water quality issues for its residents. If they aren't able to do it alone, I hope they ask for and get help from the encompassing county, state, or feds.
At the same time, I conclude that there's nothing with a productive return-on-time that I should be doing, because people who are far more informed, more educated on water treatment specifics, have devoted >100 times the amount of time as I have to understanding the issue, and are in a position (spatially and with authority) to make productive decisions are working on the problem.
Lead map: https://mytapscore.com/pages/the-lead-map
Pfas map: https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2019_pfas_contamination...
Towns around Flint spent their own money to fix their own pipes. They sacrificed to do the right thing. If a place like Flint now gets upgrades for free, we're rewarding irresponsibility. The voters of Flint choose to be irresponsible for decades.
Do those other towns get paid for what they already did?
The criminal charges have all been dropped give months ago.
Regardless of which party it was, the executive failures - which is what you agree is the problem when you say "they're just incompetent at their job" - cannot be in any meaningful sense a local problem when the executive is being run by a state appointee and not an official elected locally or appointed by one. The emergency manager system is just another case of the nepotism you mention.
Democrats ran Flint into bankruptcy, but they're off the hook...
“Although many small water systems are run well, it's often the case that they lack resources to monitor and update infrastructure in a timely fashion or manage the water's chemistry carefully. In theory, larger city water systems adjust their water's chemistry continuously to prevent health risks, but, as we've learned from Flint, this is not always the case.”
There's no reason to continue reporting on Flint as the water there has met EPA standards for lead for two years now.
https://eng.vt.edu/media-center/articles/2017/flint-water-me...
It's not clear why, but it sounds like the new AG realized there was some irregularity in the investigation that could scupper the prosecution at trial.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/us/flint-water-crisis-cha...
It's also one of the main reasons why the CDC recommends that everyone take off their shoes when they enter the house.
What do you mean by power? The people, even the adults, of Flint have no power. This is how they ended up with poor water in the first place.
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/lead/index.cf...
The city leaded the water supply in april 2014, and the wikipedia timeline says that no one was reporting the elevated lead until february 2015. Even then, the city denied that there was even a lead problem all the way up through september 2015.
Do any medical professions know what "chronic" means in this context? Would 17 months be chronic for someone who was cooking and showering and drinking leaded water?
Admittedly, they did have a way higher exposure than anyone else, but we definitely were spewing enough into the atmosphere to affect everyone.
Thus all water supplies should be managing to reduce the ability of their water supply to reduce lead. I would also suggest that you should go to your town board and say your number one issue is getting rid of all the lead - and you are fine with reverting major roads to gravel to pay for it. (and seriously consider what other services are can be eliminated to find more money)
A lot of people don’t realize there was (and maybe still is) a huge outbreak of Legionnaires disease. Somehow the city suppressed the news about it.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/a-brand-new-l...
If you were living in flint at time time and were aware of the lead contamination, would you or your family consume the water?
I don't remember the exact number, and can't find it in 10 minutes of googling, but before leaded gasoline was banned, the US average was much higher.
My brain wants to say around 40. I probably misremember, but it was in that range.
Which is to say that while the Flint situation is bad, it's much better than how every kid grew up when I was young.
Of note, lead levels aren’t a constant. The lead is a result of deterioration of lead soldering in the pipes by water over time. It’s an unknowable process for when and what lead will break off into the water. People ingested very high levels of lead - that is safe to conclude.
Why, on earth, is this comment not voted higher?
There are people posting liberal or conservative political rants. People posting absurdities about how high lead levels have no effect on a human in any case. All category of senselessness is represented in posts higher than this one at this point.
And a comment with actionable information that can help people mitigate problems with the very issue being discussed is relegated to the bottom of the stack? I don't normally complain about HN, but it really is getting worse and worse lately.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_...
Outside of the one house, this isn't enough lead exposure to see effects from.
EDIT: See thread below. Apparently it was not "Virginia Tech" that is the source for these measurements, as reported by the media, but a group calling themselves "The Virginia Tech Research Team". They maintain http://flintwaterstudy.org/ and you can evaluate them for yourself.
https://imgur.com/ZUoXQ52 http://flintwaterstudy.org/about-page/about-us/
In fact, they look like an advocacy organization, not scientific group at all. Something stinks to high heaven here, and it's not Flint's water.
Here we have the Paper of Record saying they want to blame kids’ suspensions on a year’s exposure of barely elevated lead levels in water — levels which by the way probably put the average Flint house in the 90th percentile, but surely not the 99th percentile of houses nationwide. But national statistics don’t make a good story, you need a lens to present it through. So Flint might be that lens, but this is the media getting high on their own supply.
The destruction of the two parent family probably has more impact on crime than lead.
I read a story (can't find it) about a contractor who intended to do a high quality job taking care of the lead pipes ... but the city of Flint instead gave it to a different contractor, who charged more, did a crappier job (leaving many problems unfixed), used obsolete tech, and took longer.
But, the chosen contractor was politically connected, so ...
The problem with Flint was that they thought having state government take them over and make all the decisions would result in better decisions being made. But that's not how it works. Sometimes, it just results in other people making bad decisions on your behalf.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326090313.h...
However, much of the crime isn't reported any more, or acted on. Flint has a ratio of almost 1 police officer per 1,000 residents, with is a quarter of a city like nearby Detroit.
Without cops to record the crime, much less act upon it, the numbers are artificially deflated. Someone could break into your home and since the cops don't come by for 6 hours t oinvestigate it just gets forgotten about.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689675/
> Childhood lead exposure is associated with region-specific reductions in adult gray matter volume.
> Affected regions include the portions of the prefrontal cortex and ACC responsible for executive functions, mood regulation, and decision-making.
> These neuroanatomical findings were more pronounced for males, suggesting that lead-related atrophic changes have a disparate impact across sexes.
Combine that with the adverse selection of population, it could get quite a bit more dire. If you had significant resources and flexibility, you’ve probably already moved your family out of Flint. As things get worse, people with “any” rather than “significant” resources/flexibility will move out. As you remove swaths of population who (for whatever reason) tend to commit less violent crime, your remaining violent crime rate gets worse.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
But yes, race-related discussions are fraught, and there's little doubt that race-related, if not racist, beliefs and feelings lie behind some of what people say in them.
Given the context (American society and history), the situation is unlike other controversial topics. It's like comparing critical decision-making to kneejerk reactionism; we just can't seem to help ourselves. I feel like that's worth pointing out, above and beyond simple exhaustion with the "Actually" crowd.
After that first wave of comments, we frequently see a second wave of objections that react in a reflexive way to the first wave. Although they take the opposing position—defending the article and criticizing the comments—it's the same contrarian dynamic, the same mechanism, driving them. Usually the second wave gets upvoted the most, leading to the paradox of the top comment in a thread expressing how bad the thread is, or the most popular comment expressing how wrong the populace is.
There's a place for such comments, and it wouldn't work to exclude them anyhow. But their rapidity means that they add less information. That's not because they're shorter (though it does take longer to add more information). The problem is how predictable they are. They're fast because they're largely precomputed—they're really responses to past things, stored up and ready to fire when a similar-enough signal arises. Comments like that make for repeats of past discussions, which are less interesting. They don't gratify intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Comments that add new information, rather than repeating what has been thought or felt or said before, tend to be reflective rather than reflexive. This happens when a topic sparks a new thought or feeling, or touches an unusual experience one has had. These comments add new information and encourage discussions that aren't just repetitions of old ones. But they require processing time: they have to be computed from scratch, not just fetched from cache. It isn't just that they take longer to write, but that it takes longer to form new pathways. It also consumes more energy, which means that reflective comments tend to come out quieter and more delicate than reflexive ones do. And they take more time and energy to read, too, so replies are more likely to be reflective in their own right.
The task of HN can be summed up as: how can we nurture reflective responses and give them priority over reflexive ones, given that the latter are both faster and stronger? How can we get into a reflective-reflective cycle rather than a reflexive-reflexive one?
I agree with you about race relations being a force multiplier on this (and also [1]). But I'm insisting on the more general issue of contrarian dynamics because it shows why you can't conclude that negative comments, which spring up like mushrooms when a thread is fresh, represent the community. It's a non sequitur, for example, to imply/conclude as you did in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21474980 that HN's community must be racist because the comments found fault with the article. That phenomenon is general: the comments always find fault with the article [2]. The fact that the community upvoted your comment to the top (where it was sitting before I moderated it) suggests that much of it is aligned with your view. This interplay between votes and comments is typical.
Most of what we see on HN is so determined by the basic structure of the internet and the initial conditions of this forum that I appreciate McLuhan's "the medium is the message" more every day. It is far more deeply true than I ever realized.
[1] You're right that the context of American society and history makes the topic of race especially charged. But it's even worse than that here. HN's audience is at least half outside the U.S., leading to additional externalities and conflicts that look like something other than what they are, and so are particularly difficult to understand. This overlaps with the American context in inflammatory ways that make the threads both worse and harder to recover from. Basically everybody is fighting from their own, often very different, context and history without even realizing that they're doing it.
[2] That phenomenon is also far stronger than it appears to be, because as moderators we're constantly doing things to counteract it. If we didn't mark shallow dismissals and reflexive negations as off topic, which lowers their rank on the page, they would probably dominate every thread.
The answer to the issue is fairly simple but relies entirely on the humility of HN's userbase, particularly in regard to topics that seem easy to expound upon "logically" but for which they generally are lacking in knowledge of or experience with.
Therefore, I have little hope.
I'll keep pointing out the fallacy when I see it, though.
The comments encourage critical thinking about the claims made by the post.
Flint was run by Democrats and they decided to end their water deal with Detroit, Detroit, also run by Democrats, decided to cut off Flint. Michigan’s Department of environmental quality, also not populated by Republicans, suppressed findings about Flint’s water and the federal EPA, led by a Democrat appointed by a Democrat president, knew about Flint water dangers for months and did nothing. The city of Flint destroyed its finances through the mismanagement of the Democrat leadership. The emergency manager, a Democrat, was kept in place by the Republican governor in order to be “bipartisan” and to ensure the locals were more comfortable than they would have been had a potentially more qualified, not necessarily Democrat, emergency manager been appointed. So the failure of that emergency manager is attributable to Snyder — but the reason the situation ended up existing in the first place was because of complete incompetence from the government that was elected by the people in Flint and exacerbated by the people that elected the government of Detroit.
Internet Rule 815: find a Republican or conservative anywhere near the scene of the crime and that Republican is the one deserving of all of the blame. This is closely related to Internet Rule 816, which is to immediately blame capitalism for the ineptitude of a government, especially one representing people of color.
That name though. The Neurodevelopmental Center of Excellence is in Flint. It's like hosting an event called the Summit for Cancer-Free Japan, and holding it at Fukushima.