By Jeff Salisbury
TV political
commentator Rachel Maddow reports on the poisoning of Flint, Michigan residents when their water supply was switched, and shows explicitly how responsibility for the tragedy falls to Governor Rick Snyder and his radical, anti-democratic policies.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/toxic-water-tragedy-points-directly-to-snyder-588635715518
Listen to “Not Safe to Drink,” a special documentary about the Flint water crisis
What would you do if your tap water turned brown? If it gave your children a rash every time they took a b
ath? Or worse, what if it made them sick? Listen to our special documentary below, and hear the wild story about how the water in Flint became “Not Safe To Drink.”
http://michiganradio.org/post/listen-not-safe-drink-special-documentary-about-flint-water-crisis
Why Flint’s water crisis is so Incredibly bad
An entire generation could suffer.
An unknown number of children in Flint, Michigan, were exposed to dangerous amounts of lead in their drinking water because of a cheapskate decision to switch the city’s water source in 2014.
Lead poisoning is less prominent as a public health concern than it used to be, thanks to a decades-long effort to reduce lead exposure in children, especially from paint and gasoline. But lead poisoning itself is no less serious, because once a small child is poisoned, they can’t be cured.
“We’ve been so aggressive about this because of what it can do to the whole life course trajectory of a child,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a Flint pediatrician, told “So That Happened,” the HuffPost Politics podcast.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/flint-lead-poisoning_56732a38e4b06fa6887ca710
In Flint, Mich., there’s so much lead in children’s blood that a state of emergency is declared
For months, worried parents in Flint, Mich., arrived at their pediatricians’ offices in droves. Holding a toddler by the hand or an infant in their arms, they all have the same question: Are their children being poisoned?
To find out, all it takes is a prick of the finger, a small letting of blood. If tests come back positive, the potentially severe consequences are far more difficult to discern.
That’s how lead works. It leaves its mark quietly, with a virtually invisible trail. But years later, when a child shows signs of a learning disability or behavioral issues, lead’s prior presence in the bloodstream suddenly becomes inescapable.
When did state know kids in Flint were lead poisoned?
When did the State of Michigan first learn that kids in Flint had been poisoned by lead in the city’s drinking water?
This is one of the most critical questions to answer in the aftermath of a public health crisis that’s still unfolding in one of the state’s largest cities.
And it shouldn’t be a hard question to answer.
But when I asked Gov. Rick Snyder this week, he said he couldn’t recall.
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2015/12/17/flint-water-lead/77365380/
