Flint doctor makes state see light about lead in water
Under the steady gaze of a watercolor giraffe and tissue paper butterflies, a Flint pediatrician and mother of two last month forced the state of Michigan to snap to attention.
But getting the state to concede the probability that Flint’s water is poisoning its children with lead — after months of assurances from both city and state officials that the water is safe — was far from easy.
It required Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, 38, to sidestep bureaucracy. It meant awkward conversations and putting her hospital — city-owned Hurley Medical Center — smack-dab in a political minefield.
And it meant checking her data “a zillion times,” she said, then second-guessing herself to the point of being physically ill when a state spokesman questioned her credibility.
Just hours after state officials acknowledged her data, Hanna-Attisha felt equal parts exhausted and vindicated — at one moment laughing at congratulatory e-mails and comments from colleagues (“Maybe they’ll give you a lead key to the city,” one had quipped), at another reciting sobering statistics about the life-long damage from lead poisoning: irreversible brain damage, development delays, speech problems, a boosted risk for behavioral issues, serious chronic conditions, to name a few.
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Q & A on Flint's water troubles
“It has been such a physiologic response,” she said of her look at the numbers and the state’s reaction. She sat in her office, where children’s artwork hangs haphazardly on the walls. A pink-lettered sign on her door — “This is my fight song,” it reads — pays homage to Hurley’s youngest cancer patients.
“At times I want to cry and then I’m so happy,” she said.
But then Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician for many of Flint’s poorest families whose training and experience has focused on environmental toxins and health disparities, shook her head.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/10/10/hanna-attisha-profile/73600120